Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm
Speaker 1: hoor Chimp. And today we are answering the question can
Speaker 1: we predict earthquakes? What are ways humans have tried to
Speaker 1: get a heads up on when the ground is gonna shake?
Speaker 1: Do animals have a sixth sense about it? Or can
Speaker 1: AI see things in the data that we cannot. We're
Speaker 1: gonna sit down with two earthquake scientists who are going
Speaker 1: to explain that we can actually predict earthquakes, just not
Speaker 1: in the way you expect. So hold on to something
Speaker 1: because we're taking a dive into the earth shaking science
Speaker 1: of earthquakes. Enjoy. Hey everyone, all right, Here are the
Speaker 1: top three most destructive earthquakes in recorded history, according to
Speaker 1: the US Geological Survey. In two thousand and three, a
Speaker 1: magnitude six point five earthquake happened in bomb Iran, which
Speaker 1: killed more than forty thousand people and collapsed eighty percent
Speaker 1: of all buildings. In nineteen seventy six, a seven point
Speaker 1: eight magnitude earthquake struck Tangshan, China, and it's said to
Speaker 1: have killed between two hundred and fifty and eight hundred
Speaker 1: thousand people, mostly from the collapse of unreinforced brig or
Speaker 1: concrete homes. The deadliest earthquake ever is thought to have
Speaker 1: happened in fifteen fifty six in Shangxi, China, which killed
Speaker 1: about eight hundred and thirty thousand people. It had an
Speaker 1: estimated magnitude of eight and reportedly leveled mountains, redirected rivers,
Speaker 1: and caused flooding and fires. The strongest earthquake ever recorded
Speaker 1: happened off the coast of southern Chile in nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: and had a magnitude of nine point five. About sixteen
Speaker 1: hundred people were killed, mostly from the giant tsunami to
Speaker 1: earthquake cost which had waves reportedly as high as eighty
Speaker 1: feet or twenty four meters. Clearly, earthquakes can be major
Speaker 1: natural disasters, and it would be great if we could
Speaker 1: predict them. So to learn more about the science of
Speaker 1: earthquake prediction, I decided to take a field trip to
Speaker 1: a major city that is fairly close to a huge
Speaker 1: fracture in Earth's crust that has caused several major earthquakes
Speaker 1: in the last century. Now, luckily I didn't have to
Speaker 1: travel very far because that city is Los Angeles, and
Speaker 1: that's where I live, which maybe is not so lucky
Speaker 1: here in La. The threat of a big earthquake happening
Speaker 1: is something you just kind of learned to live with.
Speaker 1: The good news is this is a good place to
Speaker 1: live if you're an earthquake scientist. So to learn more
Speaker 1: about today's topic, I drove over to the headquarters of
Speaker 1: the Southern California seis PIC Network, which is a joint
Speaker 1: project between Caltech and the US Geological Survey or USGS. Now,
Speaker 1: the first thing I asked him was this, how likely
Speaker 1: is it that an earthquake will happen during this interview?
Speaker 1: And this is what they said during this interview.
Speaker 2: So this interview is maybe an hour or so, probably
Speaker 2: a pretty high likelihood, and in California even probably quite
Speaker 2: a high likelihood.
Speaker 1: So at the end we're going to find out if
Speaker 1: there was an earthquake during our interview, and spoiler alert,
Speaker 1: there was. Okay, let me take a step back. I
Speaker 1: went over there to talk to my friend doctor Alan Husker,
Speaker 1: the professor at the Seismological Laboratory at Celtech and the
Speaker 1: manager of the Southern California Seismic Network, and he introduced
Speaker 1: me to doctor Elizabeth Cochrane, a researched geophysicist with the
Speaker 1: US Geological Survey. So here's my visit to the hub
Speaker 1: of earthquake research in Los Angeles. Hey, I'm walking through Caltech.
Speaker 3: Now here we go.
Speaker 1: Hello, how are you good to see? Thank you for
Speaker 1: letting me crash your meeting? No problem, fun well, thank
Speaker 1: you doctor Husker, Thank you Doctor Cochran for joining and
Speaker 1: talking with me here today.
Speaker 4: Happy to be here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Speaker 1: Can you please tell us would you do what your
Speaker 1: every day like?
Speaker 2: So, typically most of my days are spent looking at
Speaker 2: seismic wiggles, so trying to understand what happens when an
Speaker 2: earthquake occurs and the effects on people and things around us.
Speaker 5: I spend a lot of time managing so budgets, people,
Speaker 5: making sure equipment gets out to where it's supposed to
Speaker 5: be in the field. And then I'll have a grad
Speaker 5: student who's looking at moonquakes.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, okay. I started by asking them to give
Speaker 1: me a rundown. The way people have tried to predict
Speaker 1: earthquakes starting with animals.
Speaker 5: So people think that animals can predict earthquake. It's a
Speaker 5: very common. Most people do actually this, well, a lot
Speaker 5: does that learn. So some people just think that their
Speaker 5: dog or whatever has extra senses that humans don't have,
Speaker 5: and so they can sense when something's going to happen
Speaker 5: before it happens, because of better vision or hearing or
Speaker 5: maybe a sixth sense, that kind of thing. There was
Speaker 5: a study a while ago where they had people actually
Speaker 5: fell out cards about how their dog was acting and
Speaker 5: to mail it in, and what they found was people
Speaker 5: observe their pets after an earthquake, and then the amount
Speaker 5: of them sending the cards would die off over time.
Speaker 2: So it's kind of like your pet acts odd a lot,
Speaker 2: and then if an earthquake happens after that, you attribute
Speaker 2: the odd behavior that day, do them knowing an earthquake
Speaker 2: is happening, when in fact, you know five days out
Speaker 2: of seven they're doing something odd. So there is a
Speaker 2: really nice video from one earthquake in Seattle in two
Speaker 2: thousand and one that happens to be focused on a
Speaker 2: dog that's sleeping on the floor, and.
Speaker 4: The dog gets up, runs.
Speaker 2: Away, and then you sort of clearly see that building shaking,
Speaker 2: But it turns out that in fact, if you actually
Speaker 2: look very closely, the building does start shaking when the
Speaker 2: dog gets up the dog noticed the first seismic wave
Speaker 2: to arrive, and you know, because they're laying on the floor,
Speaker 2: they felt that vibration, were startled by it and got up,
Speaker 2: and then the stronger wave arrived. Then that's when people
Speaker 2: noticed and started moving around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, according to our experts, there's no convincing evidence dogs
Speaker 1: can predict earthquakes, but it has to stop people from
Speaker 1: trying other animals.
Speaker 5: There was one experiment I heard about that happened in
Speaker 5: China where they put electrodes on goats nipples, Oh, if
Speaker 5: they could predict earthquakes or whatever.
Speaker 3: Barently nothing came out of There was.
Speaker 2: Also a different experiment that was done similar thing, where
Speaker 2: someone kept tanks of these eels. And because one of
Speaker 2: the ideas are some sort of electrical signal as the
Speaker 2: rocks are breaking, and you get some electrical signals that
Speaker 2: animals that are sensitive to that would be able to
Speaker 2: detect it, it didn't work.
Speaker 1: Now, to be fair, scientists have tried more serious ways
Speaker 1: to predict earthquakes. For example, they've looked to see if
Speaker 1: the ground expands or swells right before an earthquake, or
Speaker 1: if there's an extra amount of radon gas that comes
Speaker 1: up from the ground right before an earthquake hits, but
Speaker 1: none of these studies have found anything that can be useful.
Speaker 1: Scientists have even looked to the sky for signs that
Speaker 1: predict earthquakes, specifically a layer of our atmosphere called the ionosphere.
Speaker 5: So people have looked for other things after really really
Speaker 5: big earthquakes, like magnitude eight point five and above. It's
Speaker 5: so big that it can sometimes see in a signal
Speaker 5: in the ionosphere. So there are all sorts of different
Speaker 5: agnotometers and other equipment on satellites around the Earth all
Speaker 5: the time. So they tried to look for changes in
Speaker 5: the iosphere that what happened beforehand, and it hasn't worked either.
Speaker 5: I would say I'm on the skeptical side.
Speaker 1: Okay, the I in the sphered doesn't quite work either.
Speaker 1: How about using AI?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think most of the studies that have
Speaker 2: suggested that earthquakes might be predictable using sort of deep
Speaker 2: learning AI techniques are applied to laboratory data, so those
Speaker 2: I think potentially are successful. Boothquakes are quite a bit
Speaker 2: different than earthquakes.
Speaker 4: In the lab.
Speaker 1: The ones in the lab are more predictable.
Speaker 4: Because they're more predictable.
Speaker 5: The other thing that I've seen with some of these
Speaker 5: AI techniques is they'll say that they get ninety percent
Speaker 5: prediction rate, which is great, but ninety percent of the
Speaker 5: earthquakes don't matter.
Speaker 3: The ones that matter are the big ones.
Speaker 5: So there was a kind of a prediction conference in
Speaker 5: China where if they can predict an earthquake using AI.
Speaker 5: So they said that all their predictions were doing really well.
Speaker 5: There was a nineteen six point four that actually occurred
Speaker 5: during the conference that none of them predicted.
Speaker 1: Okay, so apparently dogs can't predict earthquakes, and neither can
Speaker 1: goats or eels, or studying the ground or analyzing the
Speaker 1: gases emitted underground or measuring the Earth's ionosphere, and not
Speaker 1: even AI can predict when the next earthquake is going
Speaker 1: to happen. So does this mean it's impossible. When we
Speaker 1: come back, we're going to ask our experts why it's
Speaker 1: so hard to predict earthquakes and how in some cases
Speaker 1: we totally can predict them. Also, we're gonna find out
Speaker 1: if there was an earthquake during the interview, So keep
Speaker 1: your feet on the ground, stay with us. We'll be
Speaker 1: right back and we're back. Okay, we're asking the question
Speaker 1: can we predict earthquakes? And I already said the answer
Speaker 1: is yes, sort of. But first I wanted to know
Speaker 1: why earthquakes are so hard to predict. I mean, we
Speaker 1: can predict hurricanes, tsunamis, even solar storms. Why is predicting
Speaker 1: the ground right under our feet so tricky? We'll ask
Speaker 1: our experts this question, but before that, here's a quick
Speaker 1: two minute crash course on what earthquakes are. You might
Speaker 1: remember from school science that the Earth is made up
Speaker 1: of layers, that the topmost outer shell of the Earth,
Speaker 1: the crust, is actually made up of pieces called tectonic plates.
Speaker 1: These hard, brittle plates are sort of floating on top
Speaker 1: of softer, harder, flowy rock. It goes up and down,
Speaker 1: sort of like a lava lamp the size of a planet.
Speaker 1: But because these tectonic plates, which is what we're all
Speaker 1: standing on, are floating, they tend to move. You can
Speaker 1: think of them like giant sheets of ice floating on
Speaker 1: a crowded pool. The tectonic plates are all crowded together
Speaker 1: and they push on each other as some of them
Speaker 1: grow or get sucked back into the Earth due to
Speaker 1: the motion of the flowy rock below them. Now, imagine
Speaker 1: two big rocky tectonic plates nice to each other, and
Speaker 1: they might be pressing against each other, or they might
Speaker 1: be going in different directions, in which case it might
Speaker 1: be pressing and rubbing against each other. Or one of
Speaker 1: them might be trying to slide under the other one,
Speaker 1: in which case they might be pressing, rubbing, and lifting
Speaker 1: or sinking each other. The point is that you have
Speaker 1: two giant bodies of rock and they're pressing against each other,
Speaker 1: and all that pressure creates a lot of stress, and
Speaker 1: at some point something gives the two rocks can slip
Speaker 1: past each other suddenly, either sideways or one under the other,
Speaker 1: and that sudden slip is what an earthquake is.
Speaker 4: So an earthquake is a rapids breaking.
Speaker 2: Or slip along a fracture on the Earth. So basically,
Speaker 2: stresses build up in the earth and they're released really
Speaker 2: rapidly during an earthquake.
Speaker 1: Now, according to our experts, there are two things that
Speaker 1: make earthquakes so hard to predict. The first is that
Speaker 1: it all happens miles under the ground.
Speaker 2: So most of the earthquakes happen sort of five to
Speaker 2: ten miles deep.
Speaker 3: Oh, in subduction zones.
Speaker 5: It's much deeper because it's between where the two plates
Speaker 5: are rubbing against each other, deep underneath the earth, so
Speaker 5: it might be like fifty miles.
Speaker 1: Here's an interesting fact. Earthquakes happen at very specific depth
Speaker 1: depending on how the rocks are rubbing against each other.
Speaker 1: Earthquakes don't happen deeper because the rock gets hot, which
Speaker 1: makes it flow instead of crack, and they don't happen
Speaker 1: above about a mile or so down because the rock
Speaker 1: there is too loose or crumply. But the ones that
Speaker 1: do happen still happen about ten to fifteen miles under
Speaker 1: the ground, which makes them hard to study.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 5: It's difficult to predict earthquakes is we can't see, like there's.
Speaker 4: Rock in the way, so a nice analogy.
Speaker 2: It's quite difficult even to predict what the weather's going
Speaker 2: to be like tomorrow, and in that case, there's all
Speaker 2: kinds of information about the pressures in the atmosphere, the
Speaker 2: temperatures across a whole three D volume, and even then
Speaker 2: our weather forecasts are not exact.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: In this case, we're trying to do the same thing,
Speaker 2: except buried under miles of rock, where we don't have
Speaker 2: any or many measurements of exactly what the temperatures are,
Speaker 2: exactly what the pressures are.
Speaker 1: We're kind of blind. Yeah, So the first reason earths
Speaker 1: are hard to predict is that they happen ten to
Speaker 1: fifteen miles and sometimes fifty miles under ten to fifteen
Speaker 1: miles or fifty miles of rock. We don't have a
Speaker 1: direct view or even a way to directly measure what's
Speaker 1: happening down there. Scientists have to infer what's happening from
Speaker 1: what we can see and hear on the surface from
Speaker 1: up here and from satellites and kind of guess what's
Speaker 1: going on. Now, we can drill holes to see what's happening,
Speaker 1: but apparently that's expensive, so we.
Speaker 4: Have drilled into faults.
Speaker 2: For example, there was a hole that was drilled across
Speaker 2: the San Andreas fault perpendicularly through the fault, and if
Speaker 2: not that deep, so it's down I think it was
Speaker 2: two kilometers three kilometers, and from that one hole, we
Speaker 2: have so much more information about exactly what those materials
Speaker 2: look like, what the stresses are in that one hole, right,
Speaker 2: So it's just sampling that one point. But we haven't
Speaker 2: trailed a bunch of holes because each one of those
Speaker 2: holes cost millions of dollars and we don't have that
Speaker 2: much money.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 1: The second reason earthquakes are hard to predict is that
Speaker 1: earthquakes happen basically without warning. Remember I said that earthquakes
Speaker 1: happen because two rock plates are pressing on each other,
Speaker 1: and they're pressing really hard, and at some point something
Speaker 1: gives and the plates slip past each other or one
Speaker 1: goes under the other. Well, that give is really hard
Speaker 1: to know when it's going to happen. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like when you're standing on ice and you're pressing down
Speaker 1: on the ice. It's really hard to tell when exactly
Speaker 1: you're going to slip. Or one analogy or experts like
Speaker 1: us is bending a stick until it breaks.
Speaker 2: An even simpler example is it take a stick and
Speaker 2: you start to bend it. Can you even exactly when
Speaker 2: that stick is going to break before it snaps in half?
Speaker 2: And so this is kind of the same thing except
Speaker 2: in the earth.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is something you can try at home. Rub
Speaker 1: a stick or a wood pencil, or better yet, a
Speaker 1: single stick of uncooked dried spaghetti and start bending it
Speaker 1: as you put more bend into it. You can feel
Speaker 1: the stresses building up in the stick or pencil, and
Speaker 1: at some point you can't predict it's going to snap.
Speaker 1: The same thing happens with these tectonic plates. They press
Speaker 1: on each other, the stress builds up, and at some
Speaker 1: point they crack and slip, and that's an earthquake. Now,
Speaker 1: it's not always totally unpredictable. Sometimes an earthquake will give
Speaker 1: you some warning. It'll give you four shocks. You might
Speaker 1: have heard of after shocks. Those are smaller earthquakes that
Speaker 1: happen after a big one. A four shock is a
Speaker 1: smaller earthquake that happens before a big one. Now you
Speaker 1: might think, wait, are smaller earthquakes that happened before the
Speaker 1: big ones. Doesn't that mean the big ones are predictable.
Speaker 1: Not quite. Only some of them give you four shocks,
Speaker 1: which means it's still unpredictable.
Speaker 5: About ten percent of the time is a four shock,
Speaker 5: but it's most of the time there isn't.
Speaker 2: Although we've gotten really good at detecting really small earthquakes,
Speaker 2: we still don't necessarily see a lot of four shocks.
Speaker 2: In addition, there's nothing different about a foreshock. It doesn't
Speaker 2: look different. There's nothing that we can when an earthquake happens.
Speaker 2: We can't be like, oh, this is a foreshock.
Speaker 1: You can't take the difference between a four shock to
Speaker 1: a big one and just a regular, smaller earthquake, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So that's why earthquakes are hard to predict. They happen
Speaker 1: ten to fifteens, sometimes fifty miles under solid rock. It's
Speaker 1: a process that happens, usually without warning, just from the
Speaker 1: physics of it. Now, again, does that mean it's impossible
Speaker 1: to predict an earthquake. Well, it turns out there are
Speaker 1: two ways in which we sort of can predict earthquakes.
Speaker 1: So when we come back, we're going to learn what
Speaker 1: those two ways are and what we can do with
Speaker 1: that information. Stay with us, we'll be right back, Welcome back, Okay.
Speaker 1: At the beginning of this episode, I asked our experts
Speaker 1: what the chances are that an earthquake would hit during
Speaker 1: our interview, and we're going to find out at the
Speaker 1: end here. But first I promise there were two ways
Speaker 1: in which we can predict earthquakes. The first is that
Speaker 1: we can cause earthquakes.
Speaker 2: All right, So a fault basically is stuck for most
Speaker 2: of the time, right, And the reason it's stuck is
Speaker 2: because the forces pushing the fault together are higher than
Speaker 2: the forces trying to move it sideways. And so if
Speaker 2: you change how much fluids are in the fault, you
Speaker 2: change if you put a bunch of water in, you're
Speaker 2: effectively reducing that stress that's holding the two sides.
Speaker 4: Of the fault together.
Speaker 1: I see, you're making it slippery, or.
Speaker 2: You're making it easier for the stresses to be larger
Speaker 2: than the stress is holding.
Speaker 3: The fault together.
Speaker 2: So it's like if I was pushing down on the
Speaker 2: table super hard, it makes it really hard for me
Speaker 2: to move my hand sideways.
Speaker 4: But if I.
Speaker 2: Put a bunch of water in here, it's pushing back
Speaker 2: on my hand and making it so it's then easier
Speaker 2: for my hand to move. So one idea is that, well,
Speaker 2: if we could trigger an earthquake, uh huh, then we
Speaker 2: would actually be able to study in detail what happens.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's right. Scientists have actually considered drilling holes and
Speaker 1: pumping a lot of water into a fault in order
Speaker 1: to start an earthquake.
Speaker 2: So this is not just a of idea that we
Speaker 2: came up with today.
Speaker 4: Right, There was actually a meeting.
Speaker 2: A few years ago of folks working on earthquake physics
Speaker 2: where we actually talked about whether it would be possible
Speaker 2: to have an earthquake experiment where we actually would create
Speaker 2: an earthquake.
Speaker 1: It just seems like a terrible idea.
Speaker 2: Most of the workshop consisted of people talking about where
Speaker 2: we would do this because it had to be away
Speaker 2: from people, right.
Speaker 5: I think ideally we would want to have like a
Speaker 5: ranch of magnitudes, Like we're talking about a three or four,
Speaker 5: but if we could create a six or seven, that'd
Speaker 5: be great. Like, there's plenty of earthquakes that happened really
Speaker 5: far away from more people are and like nobody feels them,
Speaker 5: so like it'd be like one of those like.
Speaker 1: Well wait, this is just an idea, right, they haven't
Speaker 1: actually done it, have they.
Speaker 5: Well, yes, I know, we've started lots of little ones.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, well, I mean the geo thermal regions and stuff.
Speaker 5: They're doing it all the time.
Speaker 2: And there was a purposeful experiment a KTB borehole in Germany.
Speaker 2: So this was think in the nineties where a deep
Speaker 2: borehole was drilled and then they injected fluids and they
Speaker 2: triggered a number of earthquakes, small earthquakes. These were kind
Speaker 2: of magnitude one to two.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, So the idea would be to create an
Speaker 1: earthquake in order to get more data and understand them better.
Speaker 1: But we also talked about starting an earthquake to make
Speaker 1: it more predictable.
Speaker 5: Another thing along those lines, if you wanted to say
Speaker 5: we can't predict earthquakes, but we could generate one. Let's say,
Speaker 5: if we think we could generate a magnitude seven or
Speaker 5: eight on the San Andreas. Essentially we would kind of
Speaker 5: speed up the clock for when it would happen.
Speaker 1: What our experts are saying here is if we can
Speaker 1: induce earthquakes, and it looks like we can, then maybe
Speaker 1: for a region like Los Angeles where we know a
Speaker 1: big earthquake is coming, the best thing to do is
Speaker 1: to get it.
Speaker 5: We're with and so we could, you know, evacuate LA
Speaker 5: for a while, pump it as hard as we could,
Speaker 5: and see if we can create a giant earthquake on
Speaker 5: the San Andreas fault, uh huh, and then we've alleviated
Speaker 5: it now for a while, and so people can move
Speaker 5: back into La and like feel safer.
Speaker 1: In other words, we could potentially schedule earthquakes. I mean,
Speaker 1: it doesn't get more predictable than that. Of course, there
Speaker 1: are a few problems with this idea.
Speaker 2: The problem with that is that every large earthquake is
Speaker 2: then followed with many, many aftershocks. So and typically the
Speaker 2: largest aftershock is about only one magnitude unit less than
Speaker 2: the main shock. So if we trigger an eight, we're
Speaker 2: then going to have a magnitude seven aftershock. Plus you
Speaker 2: know many six's, hundreds of five, you know, thousands of fours,
Speaker 2: So how long four years? So in general, aftershock sequences
Speaker 2: can go on for decades, and so just alleviating the
Speaker 2: stress means that you're then stressing all of the other
Speaker 2: faults around it in new ways, and so then those
Speaker 2: can have their own earthquakes. And so maybe it's maybe
Speaker 2: it's not the best.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's think about that one a little more, all right.
Speaker 1: And then the other way in which earthquakes can be
Speaker 1: predicted is if you consider the timescale of your prediction.
Speaker 1: Remember the analogy of bending a stick and not knowing
Speaker 1: when it's going to break, Well, that's not quite true.
Speaker 1: You do have some sense of when it's going to snap.
Speaker 5: You have a general idea of on that timescale. It
Speaker 5: might not happen instantaneously, but there's a within a few
Speaker 5: seconds you can make it happen.
Speaker 1: Right, Meaning like if I start bending it stick, I
Speaker 1: sort of know within a few stens of seconds when
Speaker 1: it's going to snap exactly.
Speaker 5: And so like we're actually really really accurate in predicting earthquakes,
Speaker 5: but it's on the Earth timescale, right, So the Earth,
Speaker 5: the Earth is you know, billions of years old, and
Speaker 5: can say there's going to be an earthquake, you know,
Speaker 5: at the San Andreas in the next hundred years, and
Speaker 5: you're like, oh, that's really good, right, But no, it's
Speaker 5: not useful for humans.
Speaker 2: It is useful to forecasts in that way because that's
Speaker 2: how we develop building codes, right. Our buildings last for
Speaker 2: hundreds of years sometimes, and so we develop these earthquake
Speaker 2: forecasts so that we know how to build the buildings
Speaker 2: to withstand the likely events that those buildings will see.
Speaker 1: So we may not be able to predict earthquakes down
Speaker 1: to the minute or hour or even month or year,
Speaker 1: but through some amazing science by awesome scientists, we can
Speaker 1: somehow see beneath miles of rock and have a sense
Speaker 1: of when big earthquakes can occur, which maybe is enough.
Speaker 1: It can give us guidance about building codes and put
Speaker 1: people unnoticed to be prepared. And speaking of being prepared,
Speaker 1: let's find out if there was an earthquake during our interview.
Speaker 1: All right, well, thank you so much for talking with me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's go check to see if an earthquake happen.
Speaker 3: Let's do it.
Speaker 1: So where are you taking?
Speaker 3: Just right? Monitor? Yeah?
Speaker 1: What is it?
Speaker 5: This is data coming from the Southern California sized network.
Speaker 5: This is a monitor that we're collecting all the four
Speaker 5: hundred stations.
Speaker 2: So we're obviously not showing all of the different centers,
Speaker 2: but they're all across Southern California and listening to all
Speaker 2: the little events happening on the faults nearby.
Speaker 5: But most of this is just noise. But this line
Speaker 5: right here, this flat line, that's an earthquake. Whow So
Speaker 5: at about twelve to ten there was an earthquake. It's
Speaker 5: probably an aftershock of the ridge gross earthquake.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or there's a little swarm of events happening right here.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, there too.
Speaker 1: Okay, So at twelve ten pm Pacific time, there was
Speaker 1: an earthing and we were talking, Yes, how was this earthquake?
Speaker 3: It was been tiny, maybe like a magnitude one or two, and.
Speaker 1: It's telling you, hey, there was something yep, okay. The
Speaker 1: last question I asked doctor Husker and doctor Cochrane whether
Speaker 1: it would matter if we could predict earthquakes.
Speaker 2: You know, there's also questions of sort of if we
Speaker 2: had predictions, what would we do with it? If I
Speaker 2: knew half an hour before a magnitude eight on the
Speaker 2: San Andreas, what.
Speaker 4: Would we do right?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: So you couldn't evacuate Los Angeles in half an hour? Right?
Speaker 2: It takes half an hour to get ten miles down
Speaker 2: the road on any given day, just two to traffic.
Speaker 1: So I asked them what would you do if you
Speaker 1: could predict earthquakes at different timescales? Like what if you
Speaker 1: knew an earthquake was likely to happen in the next
Speaker 1: ten years, or the next month, or in the next
Speaker 1: five minutes.
Speaker 2: I mean ten years would be helpful if we knew
Speaker 2: which fault and how big, right, because that would be
Speaker 2: a specific scenario that we could plan for. A lot
Speaker 2: of our water comes across the San Andreas fault, A
Speaker 2: lot of our electricity are you know, so you could
Speaker 2: imagine if you had ten years and you knew that
Speaker 2: this pipe was the one that was going to be broken,
Speaker 2: you would spend that ten years hardening that pipe. You know,
Speaker 2: all of those supply lines cross the San Andres.
Speaker 5: A month is still really long, but you could start
Speaker 5: to prepare. From the governmental point of view, from a
Speaker 5: fireman FEMA, these kind of things like you, okay, let's
Speaker 5: get water, large tanks of water everywhere. If it was
Speaker 5: of magnitude eight long San Andres, is it going to break?
Speaker 5: The I five and I ten those are the major
Speaker 5: arteries that leave Los Angeles, so people won't be able
Speaker 5: to leave the county. So then like, okay, we know
Speaker 5: this is going to happen, Like what can we put
Speaker 5: in place to get ready for this that we have
Speaker 5: it bridges up quickly and to get people out and
Speaker 5: also supplies in.
Speaker 2: Warning of five to ten to thirty minutes could be
Speaker 2: very useful. So we know that there's a number of buildings,
Speaker 2: for example, in Los Angeles that have not been fully
Speaker 2: retrofit to with stand earthquakes. These are older buildings, they
Speaker 2: were built well before we knew the full earthquake hazard,
Speaker 2: and so you could evacuate those buildings.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, it might give you some time, right,
Speaker 1: all right, So to recap can we predict earthquakes? Well,
Speaker 1: they're unpredictable. They happen deep in the earth where you
Speaker 1: can't see them, and they happen because of rocks pressing
Speaker 1: on each other and slipping without warning. Despite that, science
Speaker 1: can observe the general movement of tectonic plates and build
Speaker 1: models that can give us some estimates of when they're
Speaker 1: likely to occur. And the more money we put into it,
Speaker 1: the shorter the time skill of that prediction will be.
Speaker 1: So the next time you talk to your government representative
Speaker 1: or official, try to shake them for more earthquake science funding.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, See you next time you've been
Speaker 1: listening to Science Stuff. Production of iHeartRadio written and produced
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Speaker 1: Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Pegram, and
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