Ya’ll know there is no way to predict when the Gods plan to set the ground a-tremblin and a-rumblin.
But a group of Italian geophysicists are sayin that the conventional thinkin about earthquakes may need a good shakin itself and that earthquake prediction is not as far fetched as ya’ll thought.
In fact, rumble merchants have long known that certain aspects of earthquake behaviour are highly predictable. For example, earthquakes cluster together in time. So the more recently the ground has been a-rockin and a-rollin, the more likely it is to happen again. And Omori’s law says that the size of aftershocks after a major earthquake decays with time in a predictable way, a relation that has been known for over a hundred years.
So rumble merchants can tell pretty accurately the likelihood of an earthquake in your area. What they can’t tell ya is how big it’s gonna be cos ain’t nobody found a pattern in the distribution of earthquake magnitudes over long time scales.
At least until Eugenio “Red” Lippiello at the University of Naples and pals took a look at the data. They say that a pattern has emerged that allows them to predict the size of the next earthquake with reasonable accuracy. The rule is this: the next earthquake tends to have a magnitude similar but smaller than the previous one. Simple eh!
A bit too simple if you ask me and suspiciously similar to Omori’s law (could they be rediscoverin’ the wheel here?). Earthquake prediction is an emotive topic; it can mean life or death for tens of thousands. So these guys had better be sure of what they’re sayin if they don’t wanna upset an awful lotta people.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0709.1792: On the Influence of Time and Space Correlations on the Next Earthquake Magnitude