earthquake prediction

The 1990s and early 2000s were hard times for earthquake prediction research. “For 10 years, there was limited funding in the U.S.,” says Dimitar Ouzounov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. That changed in 2004, Ouzounov says, after a magnitude-9-plus quake struck off the coast of Sumatra and set off a tsunami, killing more than 225,000 people in 11 countries.

Earthquakes strike out of nowhere — one minute everything is perfectly calm, and the next minute, the ground shakes violently and buildings crumple. However, many seemingly sudden seismic events are actually preceded by a multitude of creeping changes underground. Detecting and interpreting these changes would help forecast earthquakes, but that detection has proven difficult, partly because scientists don’t yet fully understand the complex chain of events that precipitates a quake.