EARTHQUAKE PREDICTION - A CRITICAL-REVIEW

Earthquake prediction research has been conducted for over 100 years w ith no obvious successes. Claims of breakthroughs have failed to withs tand scrutiny. Extensive searches have failed to find reliable precurs ors. Theoretical work suggests that faulting is a non-linear process w hich is highly sensitive to unmeasurably fine details of the state of the Earth in a large volume, not just in the immediate vicinity of the hypocentre. Any small earthquake thus has some probability of cascadi ng into a large event. Reliable issuing of alarms of imminent large ea rthquakes appears to be effectively impossible.