I Successfully Predicted Four Earthquakes This Week! And Why Events in Italy Today are Chilling

Before anyone gets excited about today's headline, read the following disclaimer:

NOBODY CAN PREDICT EARTHQUAKES IN THE SHORT TERM THAT IS IN ANY WAY  USEFUL FOR PROTECTING LIVES AND PROPERTY!

Allow me to repeat myself...

NOBODY CAN PREDICT EARTHQUAKES IN THE SHORT TERM THAT IS IN ANY WAY  USEFUL FOR PROTECTING LIVES AND PROPERTY!

Now...let's read this together out loud in unison...

"NOBODY CAN PREDICT EARTHQUAKES IN THE SHORT TERM THAT IS IN ANY WAY  USEFUL FOR PROTECTING LIVES AND PROPERTY!"

Good. Let's move on...

Last week was Earth Science Week, and on Thursday we in California did emergency drills for earthquakes in the Great Shakeout. In conjunction with the Shakeout, I revised a previous post about the myths and misconceptions about California and earthquakes. It was quite long, so you may have missed that I predicted a couple of earthquakes in one of the later paragraphs. They were as follows:

• 200 earthquakes will occur in California,
• Of these, there will be a magnitude 4 quake in southern California, most likely in the Colorado Desert near Salton Sea.
• There will be a magnitude 3 earthquake in northern California, most likely north of the Bay Area, somewhere around Clear Lake.
• There will be a larger quake at the Vanuatu Islands in the Pacific Ocean, quite possibly in the magnitude 6 range.
• There will be a magnitude 5 earthquake offshore of Japan.

So, how did I do?

Source: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqscanv/

• There were 448 earthquakes in the last week in California.
• There was a 4.2 magnitude quake in Baja California, just over the border from the Salton Sea
• There was a 2.7 magnitude quake near Clear Lake, and a 3.6 magnitude quake a bit farther north near Arcata.
• There was a magnitude 6.2 quake near the Vanuatu Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
• And finally, there was a 4.8 magnitude quake near Japan.

How about that? Five for five. 100%. So I am an earthquake predictor par excellence, eh? No. Not at all. I did what any charlatan or fake psychic (and they're all fake) would do: I played the odds. Take a bit of geologic knowledge and set the parameters wide enough, and you will almost never get an earthquake "prediction" wrong. Earthquakes happen in particular regions, and the "background" seismicity will always include some slightly larger temblors.  "Psychics" have been predicting quakes for years to pad their scores on the yearly list of predictions for the new year. They are depending on getting enough easy predictions right so they sound like they have those "special powers" even though they get practically everything else wrong.

Here's what's wrong with this...they act with impunity, knowing they will never pay a price for being wrong. They will scare people without fear of arrest for causing worry and panic.

So what was the chilling news out of Italy today? It was this: six geologists were convicted of manslaughter for failing to predict a terrible quake that killed 309 people. They were scientists who were convicted for not foreseeing the unforeseeable.

This is a huge issue. Self-styled psychics and con artists can act with impunity without fear of punishment, while responsible seismologists and other scientists are put on trial for not being able to predict something that has never been successfully predicted. Something is very, very wrong in Italy, and I hope the geologists are cleared on appeal.

People who are caught in tragedies will always need some way of understanding what has happened to them. They will often turn to a scapegoat as a way of avoiding tragedy in the future. In ancient Israel, a goat (a "scapegoat") was symbolically loaded with the sins of the people and banished to the wilderness. In the culture of the day, when the gods ruled the heavens and controlled the natural disasters that affected society, it almost made sense to do this. In this modern era, it makes no sense at all to make scapegoats out of the scientists who are doing all they can to protect lives by understanding the patterns and probabilities of earthquakes.

We can't make short-term predictions, but we can certainly make long-term ones. This is a map of the probabilities of damaging earthquakes in California over the next 30 years. Should we arrest the geologists if a quake on this map turns out to be bigger than predicted?

How to tell if an Internet Prediction of an Imminent Earthquake is Credible...

The answer is easy: It is NOT CREDIBLE..

It's sort of like asking how you know a politician/car salesperson is lying (answer: their lips are moving).

Apparently a great many tweets have been generated by the prediction of an earthquake in Berkeley, and people are concerned about it (a typical story here). The predictions are garbage. One can make numerous predictions about quakes, and eventually some may come true. And a broken clock is right twice a day.

This isn't to say that a quake won't happen while you are reading this. It could happen. That is a great reason to prepared at ALL times (extra water, food, radio, flashlight, batteries, first aid kit), especially in California and the Bay Area along the San Andreas and Hayward faults. But no one is capable of predicting such quakes in advance, and it doesn't matter how "scientific" their reasoning sounds. No planetary alignments, earth tides, uneasy animals, nothing.

Foreshocks are possible harbingers of a larger quake, but there is no way to tell a foreshock from a main shock. And many big earthquakes happen without foreshocks.

It just can't be done, so don't be misled by Internet quake predictions, and for that matter, psychic predictions (you can read what I said about them a few weeks ago in this post).

A Random Classroom Conversation and Geologic Predictions for a New Year

The professor speaks: “ Psychics predict earthquakes! True or false?”

The class: “False!” (They know I’m up to something, so even if they believe in psychic phenomena, they know as science class students they should and will almost always say “false”.)

The professor: “No, it’s true!”

Confusion ripples through the classroom for a moment. And then they get it.

The class: “Oh, we get it; sure they predict earthquakes. But they aren’t correct.”

The Professor: “But they ARE correct!”

The class: “Huh? But you’re a science teacher. You aren’t supposed to believe that stuff….”

The Professor: “Look at the usual prediction…a great earthquake will destroy a major city at some point during this year… How could they go wrong? If you set the parameters loosely enough, you will always be right. The only useful prediction will include the place, the time and the magnitude, and no one has really done that yet”

The class: “You know Professor? You are right! Those psychics don’t really predict earthquakes at all! We all really learned something today! Thank you for your brilliance!”

OK, I lied about the ending of the conversation. That never happens in my classes.

I would like to offer my predictions for the new geological year, in the spirit of BrianR at Clastic Detritus. But first, a disclaimer. This is a joke. If you googled something about earthquakes being predicted and volcanic disasters being foretold, I am doing this as a parody, and am not really making predictions. Just the same, check the note at the bottom of the page...

Here are my predictions:

• The long awaited BIG ONE, the magnitude 8 quake, will take place on the San Andreas Fault. San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or San Diego, or Palm Springs will be devastated. Despite the arguments of geologists, everything east of the fault will fall into the Atlantic Ocean.

• Yellowstone will erupt with the force of a million hydrogen bombs, and screw up Dick Cheney's vacation home in Wyoming. He will be hiding in an undisclosed location at the time and will be uninjured.

• Mt. Shasta will erupt and form a gaping caldera. In a few decades the hole will fill with water, but will have to be emptied out when the state of Oregon sues for copyright/trademark infringement.

• A giant asteroid will land in the Pacific Ocean and cause the extinction of human beings. The dominant species to survive the event will be the little geckos who sell insurance on tv.

• The Greenland Ice Cap will melt completely away, causing sea level to rise 30 feet, inundating vast areas of the coastlines of the world and displacing hundreds of millions. Global Warming deniers will blame sunspots.

• Oil prices will top out at more than $140 a barrel (Oh wait, ignore that one, can't possibly happen...)

• Oil prices will plunge to $35 a barrel (Oh wait, ignore that one, can't possibly happen...)

• Geologists will be hired out of college with huge salaries (Oh wait, ignore that one, can't possibly happen...)

• Geologists out of college won't be able to find jobs (Oh wait, ignore that one, happens every year...)

• Geologists will come to the conclusion that the Grand Canyon was actually carved very recently by a giant iron tool after discovering the fossil of a giant aquamarine bovine nearby.

Well, that's all the psychic energy I have for the day. If, even after noting the disclaimer above, any of these events come to pass, I want full credit for predicting them....