When it comes to knowing when an earthquake will strike, it’s almost impossible, but a couple of researchers may have advanced their search for earthquakes with GPS measurements several hours before the main events.
Quentin Peltieri, a seismologist at the Institute for Development Research and University of Côte d’Azur in France, and his colleague Jean-Mathieu Noquet examined the recorded locations of these stations in the 48 hours before the earthquake by locating GPS stations located around known locations of earthquakes of magnitude 7 or greater.
They calculated how closely the actual motion matched the motion they expected each earthquake to produce.
The researchers found that in the last two hours before the earthquake, the ground movement often matched the predicted movement.
This alignment appears to intensify as the time of the earthquake approaches.
Therefore, the movement during these last two hours may contain the precursors that seismologists have been looking for for so long.
But even with this knowledge, seismologists are far from turning it into a method of predicting earthquakes, because today’s tools are not sufficient to detect such motion before it occurs.
Existing equipment, the researcher says, needs to be about 50 times more sensitive to detect a precursor of an earthquake.
“It’s a huge technology gap,” Beltree added.
Their discovery provides evidence that earthquakes are not chaotic, but rather instantaneous events caused by faults that move suddenly. The research is published in the journal Science.
