By Sarah El Arab | Staff Writer
No words can describe the catastrophic earthquake that hit southwestern Turkey and north Syria on the fifth of February. An earthquake of magnitude 7.8 struck at 4:17 am followed by a 7.6 magnitude earthquake nine hours later. The huge disaster resulted in flattened cities, thousands of injuries, and an alarming death toll of more than 25,000 that only increases with time. Panic occupies the hearts of the afflicted parties and the surrounding countries worried about other earthquakes taking place augmenting additional tragedies. The real question that arises here is whether specialists are able to predict earthquakes prior to their striking, or not.
Various technological tools across the decades were created with regard to earthquakes pre and post shock. For this purpose, Google developed an earthquake detection system on Android smartphones that uses the phone’s built in accelerometer to detect seismic activity. This tool provides an alert prior to the strike by a short amount of time so that the appropriate measures can be taken. However, Google’s tool and other similar technologies are not practical for use as they do not offer information in the sight of the disaster occurrence, and hence no momentous action can be taken to prevent the calamities resulting.
In accordance, earthquake enthusiasts in science and technology fields have been unceasingly trying to figure out techniques that allow them to predict an earthquake ahead of its occurrence. Until this day meteorologists and seismologists can only forecast earthquakes and not predict them; in other words, earthquake forecasts similar to weather forecasts, combine different data fed modals to produce a forecast. Nonetheless, earthquake forecasts tend to give false alarms the vast majority of times. According to the United States Geological Survey, these earthquake forecasts cannot be precise since the earth is always subjected to seismic noise from traffic, construction, and other factors unrelated to its natural noises that provide false signals, and a prediction is said to be successful only if it was able to detect the location, time, and magnitude.
Recently, however, scientists in China are eagerly deploying artificial intelligence to detect subtle signals that humans tend to miss. In addition to that, machine learning algorithms are also being developed for better seismic pattern detection in the coming future. The following findings still remain theoretical, and thus, the fear of sudden earthquake strikes remains.
In conclusion, no scientist before has been able to predict a massive earthquake, and predicting earthquakes remains an unsolvable algorithm till this time; seismologists still try to uncover the underlying factors that might reveal the mysteries behind earthquakes. Until then, humankind continues to write a repeating history of the series of earthquakes which have been striking since the existence of earth, wrecking cities, and taking countless lives.