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70%chance a 7.0mag or higher quake will strike Tokyo by2016
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Pitarou

Joined: 16 Nov 2009
Posts: 1116
Location: Narita, Japan

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 11:17 am Post subject:

nicenicegaijin wrote:

Yes, you are right I do belittle religious faith, most intelligent people do.
How can you possibly believe the noahs ark story or ...

Woah! Where did that anti-religion rant come from? What on earth has it to do with the rest of the discussion?

water rat

Joined: 30 Aug 2014
Posts: 1098
Location: North Antarctica

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:03 pm Post subject:

Pitarou wrote:

water rat wrote:

no one can say "This city between these two dates; 7.0 magnitude earthquake." It can't be done!

Put away your straw man. Nobody is saying it can.

There's a world of difference between saying "there will be an earthquake" and "there might be an earthquake", and I don't think it's going too far to quantify that "might" with an estimate of probability.

It's no straw man argument. Notice I did not use any modal verb. No will. No might.

I said that I myself 'estimated' that a quake severe enough to feel would happen soon when there was none for about a 45-day period in 1988. For Uni Tokyo seismologists to say there is a 70% chance of a big one between January 1st and December 31st 2016 is a no-brainer. All they've said is there is more than a 50-50 chance of an over 7.0 magnitude quake. So if there is not, no one will be a bit surprised or be able to say that their predictions are crap.

I maintain that some sensationalist TV reporter 'tricked' them into saying that it 'could' happen'; that it was 'more likely than not'. I never suggested I am 'smarter' than a UT seismologist, I just know that any real seismologist would never say such a thing as "this time: this place". It would be akin to my doctor telling me over the phone that I have Lou Gehrig's Disease. A responsible doctor would never make such a diagnosis from a patient's phone call.

Because the OP is being so stubborn to his own trollish ends, I looked it up despite that I know perfectly well because I have been reading about this subject for 40 years: earthquakes cannot be predicted. Animals might sense one a few hours before, probably because they can hear things we can not, but even a gorilla fluent is sign language could not say four years in advance that an earthquake will occur or that it will be rather large or maybe humungously large (she's not sure) and has a 70% chance of occurring. Even apes are more careful scientists than that!

Again, estimating them is a cinch. I did it myself once in my head in a millisecond one fine day in 1988. This doesn't make me a genius, a prophet or smarter than anyone else. A child could have done it. If I had been wrong - no problem since I didn't go on record before TV reporters about it. And if I had been wrong, well, then in another week or two there would have been a 'feelable' quake. This is Tokyo we're talking about.

To give an idea to those of you who have never lived there, in my final week living in suburban Tokyo there were two earthquakes severe enough to wake up sleepers from their beds: one on Monday and one on the very Saturday I departed.

So when nicenicegaijin (a.k.a the banned Mteacher) tells us he won't go to Tokyo it's not so much that he has religious-like faith in Geology PhDs as he claims, it's that he's looking for a way to tell us he makes so much money that 160,000 yen means nothing to him, and that he has an SUV and we don't.

Last edited by water rat on Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:18 pm; edited 3 times in total

rxk22

Joined: 19 May 2010
Posts: 1629

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:06 pm Post subject:

Pitarou wrote:

nicenicegaijin wrote:

Yes, you are right I do belittle religious faith, most intelligent people do.
How can you possibly believe the noahs ark story or ...

Woah! Where did that anti-religion rant come from? What on earth has it to do with the rest of the discussion?

I also like how he assumes that all religions are Abrahamic in origin. All of them.
Anyhow, ignore him, as he is a troll and/or a weirdo

water rat

Joined: 30 Aug 2014
Posts: 1098
Location: North Antarctica

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:14 pm Post subject:

rxk22 wrote:

Pitarou wrote:

nicenicegaijin wrote:

Yes, you are right I do belittle religious faith, most intelligent people do.
How can you possibly believe the noahs ark story or ...

Woah! Where did that anti-religion rant come from? What on earth has it to do with the rest of the discussion?

I also like how he assumes that all religions are Abrahamic in origin. All of them.
Anyhow, ignore him, as he is a troll and/or a weirdo

You're absolutely correct. Nicenice: consider yourself ignored. My work here is done.

nicenicegaijin

Joined: 27 Feb 2015
Posts: 157

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:20 pm Post subject:

The thing I have an issue with is that due to a university research team declaring there is a 70% chance of a quake happening and me deciding based on this prediction too not go into Tokyo forever, you called me silly. It is not silly it is a risk averse decision that most people would not take due to them having a different attitude toward risk than I do. That is all it is. The religion rant was in there since water rat said he would pray in the case of an earthquake to keep him safe. To which I answered there is no god, in my opinion.

water rat

Joined: 30 Aug 2014
Posts: 1098
Location: North Antarctica

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:38 pm Post subject:

nicenicegaijin wrote:

The thing I have an issue with is that due to a university research team declaring there is a 70% chance of a quake happening and me deciding based on this prediction too not go into Tokyo forever, you called me silly.

It is not silly it is a risk averse decision that most people would not take due to them having a different attitude toward risk than I do. That is all it is.

The religion rant was in there since water rat said he would pray in the case of an earthquake to keep him safe. To which I answered there is no god, in my opinion.

You still don't get it!? It cannot be that a research team on this planet made such a boneheaded declaration. A lab monkey wouldn't make such a prediction! There has been a misunderstanding somewhere. Probably media sensationalism is to blame. They prey on rubes like you. Learn to think for yourself rather than just accepting what people you imagine to be smart say.

You cannot even write proper English as this post, your topic title and most of your other posts demonstrate. Yet you claim to be working as a language professor and have an advance degree, or two. You are a fraud, and I am done with you.

Last edited by water rat on Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:04 pm; edited 1 time in total

Pitarou

Joined: 16 Nov 2009
Posts: 1116
Location: Narita, Japan

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 12:38 pm Post subject:

nicenicegaijin wrote:

The religion rant was in there since water rat said he would pray in the case of an earthquake to keep him safe. To which I answered there is no god, in my opinion.

Well your little rant was way off topic and needlessly offensive, and you didn't even make it clear what you were aiming at. I can see why people are identifying you with someone who, I understand, was banned for similar behaviour.

nicenicegaijin

Joined: 27 Feb 2015
Posts: 157

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:17 pm Post subject:

Pitarou, As an atheist I see something slightly odd when someone thinks my decision to not go to Tokyo based on a research is silly. Yet they believe a 600 year old man put 3 million animals in an ark. Surely the first is a more logical. If I was mateacher, wouldn't I be showing off about what kind of SUV I had, those are the kind of things he mentioned? I only mentioned I had one, for all you know it could be a 20 year old SUV.

Maitoshi

Joined: 04 May 2014
Posts: 718
Location: 何処でも

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 10:11 pm Post subject:

And don't forget the antiques! He would definitely be talking about his collection of antiques and his rental house with the rotemburo.

Janiny

Joined: 31 May 2008
Posts: 199

Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 12:20 am Post subject:

Quote:

Earth Sciences... Can earthquakes be predicted?

Quote:

In short, no, and the feasibility of someday developing prediction capabilities depends on your definition of "predict". Will we be able to say "a magnitude 5.2 earthquake will occur at this location, at this time", no. What we're working towards and have the beginnings of is more like weather forecasts, but these are on much longer timescales than a weather forecast. So just like a weather forecast doesn't "predict" exactly what rain distributions will look like or the exact temperature at each time of the day throughout a region, earthquake forecasts are more general and usually given as something like the probability that in some given time frame (e.g. 50 years) a particular area will experience ground shaking that exceeds some magnitude. That's the short version, let's break down the things that contribute to that answer.

So, why can't we predict earthquakes. In my mind, the big contributing factors are that fault systems are inherently complicated, we have incomplete or short records of prior earthquake events on those fault systems, and we have incomplete understanding of the mechanics of earthquakes and boundary conditions acting on particular faults.

1) Complicated and interacting fault systems mean that an earthquake on one fault can load or unload a neighboring fault and that the exact location, magnitude and direction (earthquake ruptures have directionality along fault planes and this is a huge influence on the pattern of strain release associated with an earthquake) of that earthquake will change these patterns of loading and unloading on nearby faults.

2) Incomplete records Instrumental records (measured by seismometer) only go back ~100 years, then there are historical records which give you a sense of large events, but without the accuracy of instrumental records and requires that people were in a location and writing things down about earthquakes in enough detail to be useful. Paleoseismology, which reconstructs past records of earthquake through examination of the stratigraphic record within fault zones, can significantly extend our record of earthquakes, but from these records we often are not sure of the magnitude of the event observed or other aspects of the event we'd like to know (direction, did it activate other faults, etc).

3) Incomplete quantitative understanding Finally, to really predict earthquakes, or even forecast them as well as meteorologists are able to forecast weather, we need robust and predictive models of earthquakes. These models require all of the information above (where are the faults, how do they connect, where were past earthquakes, what were the details of those ruptures, etc) so the uncertainties and gaps in our knowledge of those propagate into the models. Additionally, we don't have key data like the detailed fault geometry (i.e. roughness), frictional properties along all fault planes of interest or the detailed state of stress of the crust within the models. If you think about it from the weather model analog, with that, we have the advantage of short time scales. We can run some simulations, produce a forecast, see whether that forecast was right in a few days and improve the simulation. With the earthquake models, if we're concerned primarily with large earthquakes, we can run a simulation, produce a forecast, and then wait 20-100 years to see if we're right. This long time scale makes model validation hard, to put it mildly.

However, all of these datasets are improving. As we grow our instrumental record we develop more complete understanding of how particular fault systems behave. Similarly, the more paleoseismological datasets we develop and as we expand the range of techniques applied to these, we build a more complete long term record of earthquakes. Our models of rupture on faults is also improving rapidly, but at the end of the day, there will also be uncertainties in all of these data which will impact our ability to "predict" an earthquake. Our forecasts will improve, but it may take a couple of seismic cycles (time between two major earthquakes on a particular fault/fault system) do really validate particular forecasts. The problem is that depending on the fault, the length of a seismic cycle ranges from decades to thousands of years.

Quote:

Short answer: No

Slightly longer answer: No, not to the extent that you could put a time frame on it that would be of much use. If enough data exists you could maybe put a range that would normally cover periods in which they could happen. However they could be delayed or sooner than you expected. There is not enough know about the mechanics or data to accurately predict them.

Quote:

No.

The 2008 Sichuan huge earthquake (M 7.9) started as a limited earthquake with the apparent potential to reach perhaps around M7. The rupture propagated towards the north-east and overcame 4 barriers, one after the other. In two segments, slip exceeded 10 meters. It eventually travelled for 200 km until the end of the fault yielding a total energy tens of times the energy expected from the initial rupture.

How could one predict that an earthquake would produce 10m of slip more than 200 km away? How can one be sure that it will overcome this barrier but not the next one?

Intermediate-term forecasting of earthquakes is promising but still very far from being called "prediction". One of the many successful cases was the forecasting of earthquakes in Northern Aegean area: with the use of the Coulomb Stress Transfer model, and based on the accumulated knowledge on the fault geometries, earthquake mechanisms and kinematics of the region, a 2001 paper identified 3 areas with a potential for a big earthquake (M >= 6) within a 20-year period. That very year a 6.4 earthquake took place exactly where it was forecasted. Last year a 6.8 earthquake took place in another predicted area, and a 3rd area has not yet produced anything

Quote:

Ok, now one would say "So we can predict earthquakes, nah?". Wrong. This is nothing more than one model. The scientific community uses it to make forecasts, then waits for the results, then assesses the model itself. This particular model has shown promising results in some areas in some cases. But other models, which have shown promising results where the Coulomb Stress Transfer model failed, they failed elsewhere. Even for intermediate-term forecasting, the scientists cannot claim that they made a forecast, unless if they used multiple models and if they all tended to the same basic results.

Now, consider the scenario for a prediction. Say that one day they say "A magnitude 6 earthquake will take place around X,Y coordinates around Z of the month". What if the depth is 10 km deeper than predicted? What if the rupture starts from the west and propagates towards the east, contrary to the prediction? What if an alarming foreshock takes place? What if it hits in the night? What if it takes place in 2 waves, or a nearby parallel fault is activated instead? These small details have a huge impact on hazard.

Personally I believe that prediction will never become a reality. Intermediate-term forecasting is very promising and can be of use by the authorities. However, in Greece where I live, once an earthquake happens, seismologists tend to make contradictory claims. One of the best seismologists said after an earthquake "We expected it". This was a bad statement: 2 of the several models available agreed that an earthquake was expected there, but the rest of the models gave no indications. It is not smart to serve such thoughts to the public. It is smart to use whatever models you want and reach to whatever conclusions you want, but when talking to the public you have to be clear. A scientist often pursues his biases, tries to reach some results he wants, and this is good because it is a motivation. But when talking to the public as a scientist you have to talk on behalf of the whole domain, because the public has no interest in hearing your personal thoughts, but rather the product of the consensus of the scientific field as a whole.

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/32wvbu/can_earthquakes_be_predicted/?sort=old

Janiny

Joined: 31 May 2008
Posts: 199

Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 7:48 am Post subject:

Quote:

Can earthquakes be predicted?

from carl_888 via /r/askscience/ sent 38 minutes ago

Yes, but only by a few seconds. By detecting an earthquake as it starts, an early warning system can give a few seconds warning before the tremor waves hit, or more for areas further away from the epicentre. Japan has such a system in place which is described here as giving 80 seconds of warning to Tokyo in practice during an actual quake. From the article:

While the systems can only furnish warnings from a few seconds to a minute or two before serious shaking starts, this can be enough time for people to take cover, stop performing surgery in a hospital, exit an elevator, or pull over to the side of the road.

rxk22

Joined: 19 May 2010
Posts: 1629

Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 12:36 pm Post subject:

nicenicegaijin wrote:

Pitarou,

As an atheist I see something slightly odd when someone thinks my decision to not go to Tokyo based on a research is silly. Yet they believe a 600 year old man put 3 million animals in an ark. Surely the first is a more logical.

If I was mateacher, wouldn't I be showing off about what kind of SUV I had, those are the kind of things he mentioned? I only mentioned I had one, for all you know it could be a 20 year old SUV.

It is fine that you are an atheist. That is your decision. But, you decided that waterrat was a follower of the God of Abraham. Which not all people are. At best,t hat makes you ignorant. You made several bounds to go after the story of Noah's ark, from responding to a simple utterance of prayer. Sounds like you are looking for any excuse to attack, and will do so needlessly.

rxk22

Joined: 19 May 2010
Posts: 1629

Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 12:37 pm Post subject:

Janiny wrote:

Quote:

This. The early warning system is the best we have at this point. I fidn these earthquake predictions, like those who predict crashes in the market. Yes, statistcally, or ever by patterns, one may be overdue, but that doesn't mean one is certain to happen in any ner term time frame.

kpjf

Joined: 18 Jan 2012
Posts: 385

Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 1:21 pm Post subject:

nicenicegaijin wrote:

If I was mateacher, wouldn't I be showing off about what kind of SUV I had, those are the kind of things he mentioned? I only mentioned I had one, for all you know it could be a 20 year old SUV.

Talking about your 70% predictions, I'd say at least 70% of the people here believe you to be Mateacher...or perhaps even 90-95% Very Happy

(Also, I'm surprised this thread hasn't been locked/deleted yet!)

water rat

Joined: 30 Aug 2014
Posts: 1098
Location: North Antarctica

Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 4:29 am Post subject:

I guess this dog has a PhD in seismology from Todai. http://i.imgur.com/MXjBNsD.gifv

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