Study:Earthquake prediction from space is more accurate

China’s deadly earthquakein the Siachuan province has once again showed that ground based earthquake prediction methods and systems are not reliable.

Traditional seismology does its best, sometimes succeeding but more often only saying something like, ‘California will be destroyed in the next thirty years.’

But remote sensing from space can provide more accurate data about locations and even dates of expected disasters.

But majority of earthquake happens in two long narrow stripes, one around the Pacific and the other running from the Azores to South East Asia. There are several other earthquake-prone regions. Half of Russia’s Far East is in a seismically hazardous zone and the seismic stations there, with only minor error, can give the future epicenter, its depth under the surface and its magnitude. But they cannot say when the earthquake will happen.

There are many methods for predicting when an earthquake will strike, the most reliable being a long term prediction for several years and possibly months, ahead. Scinetists have predicted a 99.7 % chance of a 6.7 magnitude earthquake hitting the US West Coast, more specifically California in approximately 30 years.

Mid-term predictions are highly important but not accurate.The situation with short-term predictions is highly complicated as shown by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Heichang in China.Warnings were issued days before the February, 4, 1975 earthquake and people and the people in the nearby cities remained outdoors, despite the cold weather.As a result many lives were saved.

By that time, China was conducting broad seismological surveys, using Soviet experience.Central and provincial seismic monitoring stations collected data about natural anomalies which accumulated considerable information.This helped predict the location and date of several earthquakes, including in Heichang.But a year later, a magnitude of 7.0 earthquake hit 93 miles from Beijing which nobody had predicted and claimed over 400,000 lives.The predicting optimism of 1950s and 1960s gave way to the dark pessimism of the 1990s.Therefore, research on earthquake showed a slow progress in a decade.

It turned out that predicting the earthquakes from space is much easier and more accurate. The main advantage of this high-tech method is the ability to survey to huge territories for seismically hazardous areas and predict earthquakes one to five days before the disaster.

The Russian method is based on the study of geomagnetic filed variations, which induce currents in the earth. Therefore surface field measurements can detect the hypothetical regional changes that precede earthquakes. At the same time intensive electric fields in place where earthquakes are brewing induce specific currents in the ionosphere

The breakthrough came when the Soviet Union launched its Intercosmos-19 satellite in 1979.It detected an unusual low frequency noise in a large area centred near the epicenter of an earthquake that occurred a few hours later. This finding was registered as a Soviet discovery and was later confirmed by other spacecraft.

Moreover, out of the 47 space based predictions, 44 have been correct on the registered quakes.

The above information is based on the expertise of  Yuri Zaitsev of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Space Research.