US Geological Survey Scolds Rocket Scientists for Earthquake Predictions
Researchers led by Andrea Donnellan at Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) published a paper in a reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journal last month claiming that remote sensing of the La Habra earthquake in the Los Angeles basin in March 2014 indicates the earthquake didn’t release all the stress in the region. That alone isn’t surprising—California is infamous for having an active fault system, and earthquakes notoriously redistribute stress within a region without releasing all of it in seismic waves. Where things get contentious is their subsequent claim that the area within 100 kilometers of the La Habra epicenter has 99.9% odds of sustaining a magnitude 5 or higher earthquake in the next three years.
And that’s where seismologists at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) very politely flipped their shit, as expressed by seismologist Lucy Jones. The USGS released a statement reading:
This paper claims a 99.9% probability of an earthquake of magnitude 5 or greater occurring in the next three years within a large area of Southern California without providing a clear description of how these numbers were derived. The area—a 100-km radius circle centered on the city of La Habra’is a known seismically active area. For this same area, the community developed and accepted model of earthquake occurrence, “UCERF3”, which is the basis of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Maps, gives a 3-year probability of 85%. In other words, the accepted random chance of an M5 or greater in this area in 3 years is 85%, independent of the analysis in this paper.
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