Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway1o24 | Hacker News Reader

SAR interferometry has been used to measure increased strain in the Earth's crust and identify where earthquakes are more likely. There a lot of published work which is credible. I didn't read the paper here but if results can be confirmed using other approaches could be a valid approach.

View on HN

Earthquakes short-term prediction within days or weeks (not forecasting years prior to the event) is a taboo subject for many geologists mainly US based experts (I am looking at you USGS) [1].

We have performed data analytics based on publicly available seismic data that confirmed there are indeed reliable short-term precursor (minor earthquakes around 3 Mw) in all the latest major earthquakes (more than 7 Mw) within one month prior to the event. The seismic data that we analyzed latest major earthquakes from five countries including Turkey (the same latest major earthquakes this paper is reporting), New Zealand, Japan (2024), Indonesia and Philippines. However all prominent relevant journals for seismology/earth/geology/etc, and general journals for examples Nature (main journal and its sub journal Nature Communications) and Science (main journal and its sub journal Scientific Reports) were rejecting the reporting paper before it's even reviewed by the proper reviewers, and rejected by the editors. Heck, even arXiv.org rejected the paper and it's suppose to be pre-print archive not a proper journal.

Enough ranting, my point is that based on our analysis they are really precursors for major earthquakes, and we should be monitoring these properly. In fact in the first 100 days of this year 2024, earth have experienced devastating 3 major quakes of more than 7 Mw in Japan, China and Taiwan, the most frequent in world's recorded history within the short period. The so called seismic/geology/earthquake experts, however, seems to have their mind closed that they are treating earthquakes prediction like the investment or lottery prediction (snake oils).

[1] Can you predict earthquakes?

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-you-predict-earthquakes

As a geophysicist friend used to say, in complete seriousness, the earthquake prediction problem is really easy to show expertise in.

Give location, time and magnitude. Period.

Have at it. If successful, your results will be noticed.

That's what we are going to do, if the paper is accepted in reputable journal using public offline data we can probably get grant and people working on the proof of concept for real-time implementation. Believe me to get any grant only with ideas without initial results is close to impossible, I tried a few times before. The fact that earthquake detection and prediction is a public service thing not really commercial, it not possible to get non-government or company interested in their development. I think the best is to get the algorithm and technique being utilized in nationwide IoT bssed earthquake monitoring system for example in China [1].

[1] Chinese Nationwide Earthquake Early Warning System and Its Performance in the 2022 Lushan M6.1 Earthquake:

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/14/17/4269

Imagine what health care would look like if scientists and doctors shared that attitude.

This discussion is not about if the current prediction methods are good or not, it's about if we should even try to develop these methods to begin with. How many cancer researchers would there be today if you had to cure one yourself, with no grants or outside ressources before you are even allowed to enter the field? Probably not a lot.

Your argument is a self fullfilling profecy. You justify preventing them to research how to predict earthquake by saying that they have not already predicted one.

Maybe in a couple of decades we will find out that many of the big ones could have been very easily predicted, maybe not. The way things are going, we will never know.

You raised a very interesting comparison with medical doctors (MD) and cancer, I'd say their attitudes are not much different from the seismologist and geologist, but at least they are more open towards research publication using offline data because we managed to publish several publications. To be honest our algoritm and technique was developed originally for the early detection and prediction of myocardial infarction or heart attack, and the results are very encouraging with high accuracy of more than 99% accuracy, specificity and sensitivity, the main difference is that the data was heart vs seismic . During the beginning of the research, we tried to get permission to get government hospital patients data to check against the well-known biomarker Troponin for several years but we cannot even get the reply until today (not even a negative reply).

Dr. Randall W. Jones with FirstScan cancer product was among the pioneer of cancer screening device, an engineering doctor not an MD, and he even wrote a book on the struggles and endeavours [1]. According to him "Healthcare is in crisis" and “The system is broken".

Based on our initial results using the latest major earthquakes in five earthquake error prone countries based on publicly available offline seismic data, definitely we really can predict the earthquake within several days prior to the main major shocks hopefully preventing many lost of lives, unless we screw up the analysis bigtime. But again that's what peer reviews of papers are very important and critical, but we cannot even get past the all the reputable journal editors that we sent to, in order to get any proper review, c'est la vie.

[1] The Healthcare Disruptor: How An Underdog Inventor And His Companies Are Changing Medicine And Saving Lives:

https://books.forbes.com/books/the-healthcare-disruptor/

How do you distinguish between minor earthquakes which are followed by major earthquakes, and minor earthquakes which aren't followed by major ones?

The rule-of-thumb is that there are in the order of 10.000 3 Mw earthquakes for every single 7 Mw earthquake. How do you decide which 9.900+ ones to discard? How are you going to distinguish a critical precursor from a 2.3 Mw Taylor Swift concert[0]?

[0]: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/27/entertainment/taylor-swif...

How do you expect someone to come up with a good answer to that question with proper sources to back them up if this subject is blacklisted and no one can get grants or ressources to do the research? Maybe there is a pattern that can predict it, but we won't know if the people who have access to all of the data and knowledge are being told it will kill their career if they try to find the answers.

A huge swath of the scientific publishing community - including several journals for which geology is only a fraction of the fields they cover - engaging in a conspiracy to is a pretty extraodinary claim.

You have not produced extraordinary evidence - or even evidence at all.

You also don't provide the motive for such a conspiracy.

The kicker: you claim the USGS is leading the charge in shutting down all prediction research, yet the only page you cite is to USGS page which includes a link to a group that engages in prediction experiments: https://www.scec.org/research/csep

I'm just saying we cannot even get past the editors of proper journal and pre-print server arXiv for a proper review of the paper after many submissions, is it not a red flag?

Have you seen any USGS sponsored journal with special issue on earthquake prediction?

Have you have heard any earthquake early detection and prediction competition in the US, not unlike the yearly Computing in Cardiology (CINC) competition for the improvement of CVDs early detection and prediction?

[1]George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge:

https://moody-challenge.physionet.org/2024/

https://www.cinc2024.org

Did you also check all those minor earthquakes that happened and there was no big earthquake after? or the claim is that if we wait enough there will be a big one ?

As other said just correctly preddict 10 and you will get your Nobel prize.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com