Word: forecaster
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...while residents of Hollister were sitting down to their Thanksgiving Day dinners, the earth began to sway and rumble beneath them. The brief 1-to 2-sec. quake measured 5.2 magnitude and did little damage. But its impact still reverberates through the world of seismology. The accurate forecast of the Hollister temblor was a dramatic demonstration that scientists are on the verge of being able to predict the time, place and even the size of earthquakes...
Recently, in fact, U.S. and Russian seismologists have quietly-and correctly-forecast several other earthquakes. In China, where the understanding of earthquakes has become an important national goal, ten quakes are said to have been accurately predicted in the past few years. Before two large recent quakes, the government confidently issued public warnings and evacuated vulnerable areas. Buoyed by their rapid progress in forecasting, scientists are already talking about an even more exciting possibility: actually taming the more destructive convulsions of the earth. "We can't start next year," says Geologist Healy, "but it's not a Buck...
...November 1973, after observing changes in P-wave velocity, Caltech's Whitcomb predicted that there would be a shock near Riverside, Calif., within three months. Sure enough, a tremor did hit before his deadline-on Jan. 30. Whitcomb's successful prediction was particularly important. All previous forecasts had involved quakes along thrust faults, where rock on one side of a fault is pushing against rock on the other. The Riverside quake took place on a strike-slip fault, along which the adjoining sides are sliding past each other. Because most upheavals along the San Andreas Fault involve strike...
...Chinese, too, were making rapid progress in their earthquake-forecast studies. When a delegation of U.S. scientists headed by M.I.T. Geologist Frank Press toured Chinese earthquake-research centers in October 1974, they were astonished to learn that the country had some 10,000 trained earthquake specialists (more than ten times the American total). They were operating 17 major observation centers, which in turn receive data from 250 seismic stations and 5,000 observation points (some of which are simply wells where the radon content of water is measured). In addition, thousands of dedicated amateurs, mainly high school students, regularly collect...
Once in operation, an earthquake warning system will bring with it a new set of problems. If a major quake is forecast for San Francisco, for example, should the Government shut down businesses and evacuate the populace? Where would evacuees be housed? If the quake does not occur, who will be responsible for the financial loss caused by the evacuation? Answers come more easily in totalitarian China. There, says Press, "if an actual quake does not take place, it is felt that the people will understand that the state is acting on their behalf and accept a momentary disruption...