April 28, 2015 6.27am BST
There is currently no technique that could have helped Nepal predict when the recent earthquake would strike. AP/PA/Niranjan Shrestha
theconversation – Can earthquakes ever be predicted? This question is timely after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Nepal recently. If authorities had more warning that the earthquake was coming, they may have been able to save more lives.
While Nepal is a documented area of previous seismic activity, at the moment there is no technique that provides predictions of sufficient clarity to allow for evacuations at short notice. So if we cannot predict these events now, are there avenues of research to provide useful predictions in the future?
The key word here is “useful”. It is possible to make long-term forecasts about future earthquake activity, partly by using the past record of earthquakes as a guide. There is no reason to believe that a region of the Earth is going to behave differently in the next few thousands of years from its pattern over the same range back in time. In the short term, seismologists can draw on data from recording stations, with records going back roughly 40 years on a global scale. Tiếp tục đọc “Why it is so hard to predict where and when earthquakes will strike”
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