Jonathan Bedford is Professor for Physical Geodesy at Ruhr University Bochum.
Point of view “It is a shame that we do not spend more money for earthquake science”
Jonathan Bedford has a vision: He believes that earthquakes will one day be predictable. GPS technology might be the key. But more efforts are needed.
A lot of people in our research field will say that earthquakes are fundamentally unpredictable. I would disagree.
We are in a very early stage of earthquake science. Seismometers have been available since roughly 150 years. GPS, which can also be used to monitor movements in the Earth’s crust, has only been available in the past two or three decades. This means that we are quite young as a research field.
If we had more data, I think we could forecast the fault behavior. Whether that is going to be a direct earthquake forecast remains to be seen. However, more and more people in the field have optimism again that it will one day be possible.
One reason is that we can now squeeze rock samples or create scaled analog fault systems in the lab and record a lot of data there. And when we have a lot of data, we can create a model that is able to predict what is going to happen at the fault.
Additionally, with GPS we can see where a fault is moving weeks and months before an earthquake occurs. These movements do not always have a seismic signature so that they cannot be detected by seismometers. GPS has the potential for revealing what is happening at the fault in real time. But if we want to get there, we need hundreds or thousands of people with a mission together to do it.
If you consider the human lives at stake, we do not spend enough as a field.
I think we need a commitment in our field to having more data. If you compare our research area to particle physics or astronomy you can see that we do not spend anywhere near as much money as they do. That is a big shame. Think how many people will die in a large earthquake – and how many have died: Just remember the earthquake in the Indian ocean that killed hundreds of thousands of people in 2004. Or the 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria that killed tens of thousands. If you consider the human lives at stake, we do not spend enough as a field.
You usually win money from a funding agency because you say you want to record data in a certain region that is especially vulnerable to large earthquakes, but there is not much data there yet. Targeting specific areas is a conservative approach. I think: Let’s pepper the planet, especially the fault zones, with stations and get the data. With more data and more sophisticated techniques, earthquake forecasts may be possible one day.
We have to be more ambitious as a field!