An earthquake measuring 6.2 rocked central Italy in the early hours of Aug. 24, leaving more than 200 dead and hundreds missing in the rubble of the disasters.
Given the devastation earthquakes cause, seismologists and public officials have long wanted to know when earthquakes will happen, and after the powerful 1964 Alaska earthquake, U.S. scientists proposed a worldwide research program on earthquake prediction.
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The public has been interested more in prediction than in mitigation, however. And in spite of major progress among scientists in understanding the earthquake process and what causes disastrous shaking, it seems there is substantial disappointment in the apparent failure of “earthquake prediction.”
To some extent, this is an issue of semantics and objectives. Is the goal to predict an earthquake occurrence, predict ground motion due to an earthquake, or predict a disaster? Considering all of these, what is it that seismologists can and cannot do when it comes to predicting earthquakes?