Earthquake Prediction

 Experts say quake forecast is “extremely hard” because of the complexity of fault lines, points where massive and irregularly shaped slabs of solid rock meet below the Earth’s surface. An earthquake of 8.8 magnitude, one of the 10 strongest ever recorded,  struck  Russia’s Far East early on Wednesday, leading to a tsunami alert throughout the Pacific region. Even as “tsunami waves” were reported in Japan and Alaska, panic spread through Japan to the US state of Hawaii. Governments moved to evacuate coastal cities facing a greater risk of potentially massive waves crashing into urban areas. Despite giant scientific leaps that have enabled the human race to forecast major climatic and natural disasters, including tsunamis, earthquakes remain largely unpredictable. There is no accurate warning system for earthquakes, and any progress towards building one is hardly substantive. Experts  say  earthquake prediction is “extremely hard” because of the complexity of fau...

On February 6, 2023, centered in the province of Kahramanmaraş, southerrn Turkey, two major earthquakes occurred with magnitudes of 7.7 and 7.6 on the Richter scale, with a 9-hour interval between them. These earthquakes resulted in tremendous number of deaths and injuries in 11 cities in the region. In events like these, dead-at-scene rates (coded black in disaster triage situations) are high, and additionally, crush syndrome (CS) is frequently encountered in patients rescued from the debris [1]. CS, also known as traumatic rhabdomyolysis, is most commonly seen in earthquakes, wars, mining accidents, landslides, volcanic eruptions, motor vehicle accidents, and multiple trauma victims, especially those who are trapped for a considerable time, which may result in CS and compartment syndrome [2]. Additionally, CS can be encountered in the emergency department (ED) for routine reasons such as poisoning, stroke, and falls [3]. Theoretically, any situation that results in prolonged immobili...

  When an earthquake causes a landslide, debris flow, or erosion, it can change the makeup of nearby lakes by introducing larger sediment particles, causing faster sediment buildup, and affecting carbon sequestration. The sediments that build up on lake bottoms act as a historical archive, recording the lake's biological, physical, and chemical changes and how they affect microbes such as diatoms (microscopic glass-like algae). Yet little is known about how sudden, earthquake-driven disturbances may affect lake ecosystems. Xue and team looked at the long-term changes in Lake Cuopu (Lake Tsopu) in the Himalayas. The 200-kilometer radius around the lake experienced 63 earthquakes greater than magnitude 5 between 1900 and 2017. The lake's high altitude, alpine climate, and low human activity made it an ideal site to examine the microbial and geochemical changes caused by these earthquakes. In 2017, researchers took a 45-centimeter-long sediment core from the center of Lake Cuopu, ...

Editor’s summary Earthquake early warning systems depend on real-time analysis of waves detected at nearby seismic stations or by smartphone accelerometers. The latter approach, although less sensitive, is a promising way to offer alerts in areas without seismic stations. In a major step forward, Allen  et al . describe the outcomes of an alert system rolled out to Android phones in 98 countries, which increased total warning system access 10-fold to 2.5 billion people over 3 years. Issuing more than 1200 alerts over that period, the system recorded low-magnitude errors and provided preshake warnings consistent with other detection systems but on a much larger scale. —Angela Hessler Abstract Earthquake early-warning systems are increasingly being deployed as a strategy to reduce losses in earthquakes, but the regional seismic networks they require do not exist in many earthquake-prone countries. We use the global Android smartphone network to develop an earthquake detection capabil...