We know the quakes are coming. We just don't know how to tell enough people early enough to avoid the catastrophe ahead. Around the world more than 13,000 people are killed each year by earthquakes, and almost 5 million have their lives affected by injury or loss of property. Add to that $12 billion a year in economic losses to the global economy (the average annual toll between 1980 and 2008). Understandably for some time scientists have been asking if earthquakes can be predicted more accurately.
Unfortunately, the conventional answer has often been “no”. For many years earthquake prediction relied almost entirely on monitoring the frequency of quakes and using this to establish when they were likely to reoccur. Despite the plethora of other potential warning signs – from changes in atmospheric conditions to hordes of snakes erupting from the ground (as seen before the Haicheng earthquake of 1975) – prediction rates have been too low to prevent often massive-scale loss of life and damage.
Academics often put forward arguments that accurate earthquake prediction is inherently impossible, as conditions for potential seismic disturbance exist along all tectonic fault lines, and a build-up of small-scale seismic activity can effectively trigger larger, more devastating quakes at any point. However all this is changing. Big Data analysis has opened up the game to a new breed of earthquake forecasters using satellite and atmospheric data combined with statistical analysis. And their striking results seem to be proving the naysayers wrong.
One of these innovators is Jersey-based Terra Seismic, which uses satellite data to predict major earthquakes anywhere in the world with 90% accuracy. Recent predictions included a warning issued on February 22 of this year that a quake with a magnitude of around 6.5 on the Richter scale (“strong to violent shaking”, with moderate damage to well-built structures and minor damage to even earthquake-reinforced structures) would shortly hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra. On March 3, the island was indeed rocked by a 6.4 magnitude quake.
Terra Seismic CEO Oleg Elshin told me, “Thanks to our unparalleled satellite Big Data technology, in many cases we can forecast major (magnitude 6+) quakes from one to 30 days before they occur in all key seismic prone countries.” Elshin claims to have forecasted Tarapaca, Chile’s megaquake (magnitude 8.1), Guerrero, Mexico's 7.2 quake and 6.4 quake in Indonesia nine days before it hit on March 3.
Although the company was launched in 2011, the systems have been in testing since 2004 using data from US, European and Asian satellite services, as well as ground based instruments, to measure abnormalities in the atmosphere caused by the release of energy and the release of gases, which are often detectable well before the physical quake happens. It uses open source software written in Python and running on Apache web servers to process large volumes of satellite data, taken each day from regions where seismic activity is ongoing or seems imminent. Custom algorithms analyze the satellite images and sensor data to extrapolate risk, based on historical facts of which combinations of circumstances have previously led to dangerous quakes.
Of course plenty of other organizations have monitored these signs – but it is big data analytics which is now providing the leap in levels of accuracy. Monitored in isolation these particular metrics might be meaningless - due to the huge number of factors involved in determining where a quake will hit, and how severe it will be. But with the ability to monitor all potential quake areas, and correlate any data point on one quake, with any other – predictions can become far more precise, and far more accurate models of likely quake activity can be constructed, based on statistical likelihood.
As well as offering several levels of service to its subscribing clients, Terra Seismic offers its current predictions for free through their Quakehunters.com portal. The predictions are very useful for insurance companies, which can use them to accurately assess risk and ensure assets are covered in an efficient way. Terra Seismic clients include government agencies, insurers, hedge funds and multinational corporations.
Earthquakes (and the tsunamis they cause when they occur at sea) are devastating in their cost to human lives and the economy – the 2011 Tōhoku quake off Japan’s east coast killed almost 16,000 people, destroyed over 127,290 buildings and made almost a quarter of a million homeless. Any increases in the accuracy of prediction will save lives, by enabling evacuation and disaster-relief efforts to allocate resources more effectively.
So once again we see Big Data being put to use to make the impossible possible – and hopefully cut down on the human misery and waste of life caused by natural disasters across the globe.
