THE REAL EARTHQUAKE MECHANISM

LITHOSPHERE – ATMOSPHERE – IONOSPHERE CHANGES BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER EARTHQUAKES…

“SPECULATION IS PERFECTLY ALL RIGHT, BUT IF YOU STAY THERE YOU’VE ONLY FOUNDED A SUPERSTITION. IF YOU TEST IT, YOU’VE STARTED A SCIENCE.” Hal Clement

Large earthquakes cause the death of tens of thousands of people. They cause billions of dollars in economic damage. They are feared because they appear to strike suddenly.
Prominent seismologists have stated categorically that earthquakes are unpredictable.
EOS is the weekly publication, in newspaper format, of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) distributed to more than 45,000 AGU members worldwide. Over the course of the past months several “opinion pieces” have appeared in EOS in which scientists from outside the tightly knit seismology community write about earthquakes. Those scientists report of non-seismic pre-earthquake signals such as the emission of low to ultralow frequency electromagnetic waves, a kind of radio waves, from deep within the Earth or perturbations in the ionosphere high in the sky, 100 km and up. Such signals, if they are indeed earthquake precursors, would have great value by allowing humankind to forecast major earthquakes hours or even days ahead. The only problem is that, until now or at least until recently, nobody knew how these signals may be generated dep in the rock column or at the surface of the Earth, what they really tell us, and why they seem to be unreliable, sometimes detectable, sometimes not.

Normally, if a given scientific problem is not or only imperfectly understood, most everybody in the science community feels an urge to encourage more research, more experiments, more theory, more speculation. However, in the case of the non-seismic pre-earthquake signals there is a hard core of seismologists, who do not want anybody else to intrude into the research discipline which they consider they own: earthquake science. That’s why those seismologists are now getting together and mount a major offensive against EOS with the goal to censor any further publications or discussions of pre-earthquake phenomena contributed by scientists "without basic training in seismology".

A group of four seismologists, each one a “big name” and a sterling reputation in the field of seismology, have come together and written a letter to Dr. Fred Spilhaus, the Editor-in-Chief of EOS. This letter was leaked and is now making its rounds in circles of the science community, where there is a sense of responsibility towards those tens and hundreds of thousands men, women and children who have lost their lives in earthquake disasters. Nobody can say how many of them could have been saved by some form of early warning, but NOT doing everything possible to improve the science of earthquake early warning signs might be considered a crime against humanity. Here is the full text:

Dear Dr. Spilhaus,

This letter is not intended for publication, but rather to express our concern about the article “Natural Radioactivity, Earthquakes, and the Ionosphere” published in the May 15, 2007 issue of EOS. This article claims that satellites may be used to predict earthquakes using detected fluctuations in ionosphere potential driven by release of radon gas. It follows the publication of a similar article entitled “Preseismic Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling” in the October 3, 2006 issue of EOS. The repeated publication of articles of this type raises special concern.

While there was once great hope that phenomena such as radon release, electro-magnetic signals, and animal behavior would predict earthquakes, repeated experiments have failed to demonstrate that these phenomena can act as precursors to large earthquakes. While some scientists, in particular those without basic training in seismology, continue to pursue such avenues, their work rarely meets basic scientific standards. It readily captures the public’s imagination but is seldom published in respected geophysical journals that are regularly peer reviewed by seismologists.

The May 15 article is no exception to this rule. It is written in generalities, contains erroneous factual statements (such as reference to hundreds of thousands of km2 large “earthquake preparation areas”), and presents no statistical evaluation. The most specific successes alluded to, in Pulinets et al. (2007) (listed in the EOS article as Pulinets et al. (2006), in press) are not predictions but rather postdictions: predictions of earthquakes that have already occurred. The references listed are primarily by the author himself and do not include any in JGR-Solid Earth, the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, or another mainstream seismologist-reviewed journal.

The appearance of such an article in EOS lends credence to the work as scientifically viable. It is especially misleading to members of other scientific disciplines and the public, who are not familiar with the seismological literature. Not only is the publication of such an article in EOS poor practice on scientific grounds, but it makes the public more easily confused when specific predictions are issued by unauthorized sources, and makes it more likely that such prediction schemes will receive the funds that would be much more productively spent on earthquake preparation and basic science.

Thus we strongly urge that EOS use appropriate caution with earthquake prediction articles in the future, and have them reviewed by earthquake seismologists before considering publication (which does not appear to have been done in the case of the May 15 article). Better reviewing would provide readers with a more accurate and responsible selection of articles on earthquake science.

Sincerely yours,

Karen Felzer and Sue Hough, USGS, Pasadena Office
Dave Jackson, University of California, Los Angeles
Duncan Agnew, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego

cc. Drs. Robert van der Hilst, Karen M. Fischer, Justin Revenaugh, and members of the AGU publications committee

While we do not have to agree on all details that are presented in the the EOS “opinion pieces” that the authors of the Letter to EOS Editor-In-Chief consider "offensive",we are probably united in the belief that there is no substitute to an open, unobstructed scientific discussion. We are probably also united in the belief that, for all the good that seismologists have brought to the advancement of our understanding of the hidden structures of the solid Earth, their tools are patently inadequate when it comes to earthquake forecasting and early warning. The reason is that seismologists use past events to calculate the probability of future events using time windows of typically 7 to 30 years. They try to refine their statistical models by taking into account various auxiliary information such as regional seismicity patterns or stress transfer between faults. After that, all they do is to sit and wait whether and when the next earthquake will strike.

At the same time the seismologists, or at least a powerful group within their guild, refuse to look at processes that develop – in real time – deep in the Earth’s crust, while the rocks are subjected to tectonic stresses up to a level where catastrophic rupture is likely to occur. The seismologists’ excuse is that the diverse signals, which have been reported to accompany the build-up of high stress levels and to precede major earthquakes, are not properly explained. They like to point to the fact that the alleged pre-earthquake signals are often sporadic, fickle and fleeting. They like to call the reports anecdotal and unreliable. They tend to accuse the authors of such reports of engaging in pseudoscience or worse.

However, simply ignoring or badmouthing what is scientifically not yet fully understood or not yet understandable is the wrong way to go. Interfering with the exchange of scientific information and trying to cull the open discussion of issues with which the seismologists disagree may be considered, in this specific case, a crime against humanity. Indeed any intervention with the intent to silence the opponents of conventional seismological viewpoints can led to severe economic losses and – most importantly – to the loss of life.

Ronald Karel

New Mexicans for Science and Reason presents

Beyond Earthquake Lights: Progress in Seismo-EM
click here