'Earthquake Prediction 2011 Jim Berkland - A Major Earthquake in North America Imminen'in Fox News on March 15, 2011 (Watch the video below).
Even before we settle our grief on Japan's tragedy from earthquake and tsunami last week, a geologist predicts a major earthquake will occur anytime this month, and possibly this week (between today to March 26, 2011).
Jim Berkland, a geologist who predicted the 1989 San Fransisco Earthquake, argues that weird animal behavior and phenomena such as massive fish kills near California show "changes in the magnetic field that often precede large earthquakes". Although there is no guarantee that such signs are consistent prediction of imminent earthquake, Berkland's credibility of prediction is hard to neglect. His predictions are accurate 75% of the times, which, I guess, means that there is 75% chance that his prediction is right for this one, too. If he is right about this prediction like the San Fransisco Earthquake in 1989, most of California, including the nation's important cities--San Fransisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles will be destroyed, not to mention the suburbs, too.
Many news have informed us about the impact of the 'next earthquake' in California will be the greatest in the history, which will be a 10 pointer, 30 times bigger than the earthquake in Japan last week. Although the earthquake's imminence in this month can be still skeptical, everyone agrees that the earthquake will come eventually. (See Next big earthquake...)
Some people believe a different sign of imminent earthquake-- a rainbow cloud.
Supposedly, there were 'rainbow clouds' on clear skies in China, Chile, and Japan before the quakes happened. Californians... watch out for a rainbow cloud!
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| A rainbow cloud seen 10 minutes before the earthquake in China 2008 |
What do you think?
I don’t know what to make of this. I took an earthquake class last semester, in fact, with Dr. James Dolan, an established geologist who helps runs the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) here at USC. Towards the end of the course he admitted that it’s really hard to predict earthquakes especially in size given that they occur almost every day (small ones, of course), and that it’s much harder to predict earthquakes within the next year or tens of years, but easier for earthquakes in the coming hundreds of years. And, sure, geologists point to animal life and other factors for earthquake prediction, but the truth is nobody really knows when, why do you think geologists reason that the next “Big One” to hit California will probably (and that’s probably!) in the next 30 years because the last major earthquake magnitude 7.9 was over a hundred years ago (Fort Tejon, 1857).
ReplyDeletePlus, I don’t think we’re going to have a 10.0 magnitude earthquake, first of all, because the highest ever recorded was a 9.5 in Chile. And given that Southern California is not located on a subduction megathrust zone (unlike Chile, Japan, and, more closely, the US/Canada border where they have the Cascadia megathust in which the area underneath the continental crust experiences big earthquakes), it is unlikely we’ll get an earthquake to that epic proportion. But between a 7.0 and 8.0 is definitely possible, as this is what scientists have predicted for years calling it the “Big One,” because it’ll probably be the biggest one to hit California for a while or since earthquakes have been recorded in California.
I took the same earthquake class as Adam, and I agree. It's hard to predict when the big one is coming, but they can say that there will be one in our near future. It is also true that a magnitude 10 would be far fetched because there might not be a fault big enough to generate that large of an earthquake. Also, those really really large earthquakes occur on subduction mega-thrusts. Those faults are in places like Japan and Chile, not in California.
ReplyDeleteThen, of course, mother nature could throw us a curveball.... Remember the Triangle of Life!
Third. It really is hard to predict when and where the next big one is coming. Case in point, Japan's recent earthquake. Time and time again, history has shown us that we can't predict what's going to happen with Mother Nature.
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