Earthquake prediction has been the Waterloo of many a scientist: Each tremor is unique, foiling attempts to zero in on advance warning signs. But Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a geophysicist at UCLA, and his team may have finally cracked the code. By monitoring past and present activity in seismic hot spots, they have issued dead-on predictions of major quakes that occurred in San Simeon, California, and Hokkaido, Japan, during the second half of 2003.
Keilis-Borok bases his work on the tip-of-the-iceberg premise that patterns of small seismic disturbances hint at the onset of much larger quakes. He looks for chains of minor earthquakes, then examines the seismological history of the area where they took place. If he finds such telltale symptoms as frequent small, clustered quakes during the preceding five years, he concludes that there is a high likelihood of a major quake in that region within nine months. If no historical ...
