Where will the next Pacific Mega-earthquake strike?

[n2doc]

Is San Francisco Next?
Tokyo is more likely, says a scientist whose work on aftershocks may revolutionize quake forecasting.


By JUDITH LEWIS MERNIT

JIAN LIN WAS 14 years old in 1973, when the Chinese government under Mao Zedong recruited him for a student science team called “the earthquake watchers.” After a series of earthquakes that had killed thousands in northern China, the country’s seismologists thought that if they augmented their own research by having observers keep an eye out for anomalies like snakes bolting early from their winter dens and erratic well-water levels, they might be able to do what no scientific body had managed before: issue an earthquake warning that would save thousands of lives.

In the winter of 1974, the earthquake watchers were picking up some suspicious signals near the city of Haicheng. Panicked chickens were squalling and trying to escape their pens; water levels were falling in wells. Seismologists had also begun noticing a telltale pattern of small quakes. “They were like popcorn kernels,” Lin tells me, “popping up all over the general area.” Then, suddenly, the popping stopped, just as it had before a catastrophic earthquake in 1966 that killed more than 8,000. “Like ‘the calm before the storm,’” Lin says. “We have that exact same phrase in Chinese.” On the morning of February 4, 1975, the seismology bureau issued a warning: Haicheng should expect a big earthquake, and people should move outdoors.

At 7:36 p.m., a magnitude 7.0 quake struck. The city was nearly leveled, but only about 2,000 people were killed. Without the warning, easily 150,000 would have died. “And so you finally had an earthquake forecast that did indeed save lives,” Lin recalls. “People were excited. Or, you could say, uplifted. Uplifted is a great word for it.” But uplift turned to heartbreak the very next year, when a 7.5 quake shattered the city of Tangshan without so much as a magnitude 4 to introduce it. When the quake hit the city of 1.6 million at 3:42 a.m., it killed nearly 250,000 people, most of whom were asleep. “If there was any moment in my life when I was scared of earthquakes, that was it,” Lin says. “You think, what if it happened to you? And it could. I decided that if I could do anything—anything to save lives lost to earthquakes, it would be worth the effort.”

Lin is now a senior scientist of geophysics at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, where he spends his time studying not the scurrying of small animals and fluctuating electrical current between trees (another fabled warning sign), but seismometer readings, GPS coordinates, and global earthquake-notification reports. He and his longtime collaborator, Ross Stein of the U.S. Geological Survey, are champions of a theory that could enable scientists to forecast earthquakes with more precision and speed.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/is-san-francisco-next/8488/