Are Earthquakes Predictable? Southern California Earthquake Center Receives $1.2 Million to Develop Earthquake Predictability Program

by Kirsten Holguin, USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

The W.M. Keck Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant to the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) to develop a global research program on earthquake predictability.

Rather than a laboratory, the first-of-its-kind program will be called a collaboratory -- a center without walls in which scientists throughout the world can conduct research and share data in digital libraries.

"There's no other laboratory like this in the world," said Tom Jordan, University Professor and W.M. Keck Foundation Chair of geophysics, the project's principal investigator and director of SCEC.

The first goal of the Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP) will be setting standards in tremor prediction experiments and evaluations.

Calling the process a "brick-by-brick" approach in building an understanding of earthquake predictability, Jordan said, scientists must be able to conduct experiments under controlled conditions and evaluate findings using an accepted criteria.

The new grant brings SCEC and participants one step closer to setting standards that will help the U. S. Geological Survey and California Office of Emergency Services assess the usefulness of earthquake prediction and place prediction research in the appropriate context of reducing risk to people. "California needs CSEP to understand which models of earthquake occurrence have real predictive capabilities." says Dr. Lucy Jones, Southern California Earthquake Coordinator for the US Geological Survey and a CSEP investigator.

With 15 core and 40 participating institutions, SCEC is the largest U.S. collaboration in earthquake science and has the expertise and intellectual resources to construct and sustain CSEP.

"CSEP has the potential to transform science in the global research of earthquakes," Jordan said. "It's necessary so that we can move science forward."

Goals of CSEP include:

• Establishing rigorous methods for registering prediction procedures.
• Erecting community-endorsed standards for assessing probability-based and alarm-based predictions.
• Developing hardware and software support that would allow individual researchers and groups to participate in prediction experiments; and update their procedures as results become available.
• Providing prediction experiments with access to data and monitoring products, authorized by the agencies that produce them.
• Accommodating a wide-ranging set of prediction experiments involving fault systems in different geologic environments.

"This last objective implies that SCEC cannot go it alone," Jordan said. "The collaboratory must be developed through international partnerships with scientists who share an interest in earthquake prediction research."

Jordan said the timing was right to move forward in his area. He noted that 2006 marks the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and fire that killed 3,400, according to the city's Board of Supervisors. The population of the city at the time was about 400,000. The quake along 270 miles the San Andreas Fault caused one of the worst natural disasters in the nation's history. Modern analysis estimated it had a magnitude of about 7.8.

"Despite more than a century of research, no methodology can reliably predict the locations, times, and magnitudes of potentially destructive fault ruptures on a time table of less than decades," said Jordan.

Although CSEP offers hope in the complex study of earthquake predictability, Jordan cautions that reliable predictions are not just around the corner.

Only true prospective prediction experiments, which look at future earthquake data, are really adequate for testing predictability hypotheses but it could be decades or longer before the results from these types of experiments are known.

For news media inquiries, please contact:

Mark Benthien
Director of Communication, Education and Outreach
Southern California Earthquake Center
e-mail: benthien@usc.edu
phone: 213-740-0323