This is fascinating, Josh. Thanks for the post.

Well, Bush will welcome this news: now they can scrap spending on FEMA preparedness.

Indeed. Hell, skip the satellites and just put Kucinich in charge.

I'm glad to see earthquake science make it into TNR, even if it comes in the form of a questionable claim to be able to predict earthquakes.

The real question is how often these 'disturbances' are observed before non-earthquakes. That is, do they only happen before earthquakes or do they happen all the time? Is there anything unique about what is observed before earthquakes? There are many things that often happen before earthquakes. But all attempts to identify precursors to use for prediction have failed, thus far, because despite a lot of effort, nothing that uniquely happens right before earthquakes has been identified.

Before anybody puts up satellites for a 'prototype early warning system', they need to demonstrate that what they call 'precursors' can be distinguished from other sorts of ionospheric disturbances that happen all the time. Not surprisingly, there is no mention of that in this article. Without that, Freund and Freund are just blowing hot air.

The BBC article is very well balanced, and worth reading. Pay particular attention to the statements from Mike Blanpied, near the end, as he is right on the money:

"He has two principal criticisms of the work. Firstly, he said the experiments had been done on dry - or briefly soaked - rocks at room temperature and pressure. But deep in the crust, rocks have all their voids filled with mineral solutions and are subjected to high temperatures and pressures.

Secondly, he said, the researchers' hypothesis held that rapid changes in stress and strain in the crust began a few days before earthquakes.

Dr Blanpied, who is based in Reston, Virginia, said there had never been an observation of rapid strain changes before an earthquake, which meant precursor strains before earthquakes might be too small to have been detected."

So, (1) their findings may or may not apply to real rocks in the earth, and (2) their physical explanation depends on something happening that has not been observed to happen.

I have a background in geology, though not geophysics. This is fascinating, but raises a question for me. If the electric charges are caused by stress in the rocks, the assumption would be that more stress = more charge. The problem is, earthquakes don't necessarily happen from a sudden buildup of stress, but from a prolonged, gradual accumulation of stress until a breaking point is reached. Plates don't just suddenly decide to increase in velocity and thus cause an earthquake; the dynamic is less like two cars crashing and more like two semis parked grill to grill and slowly accellerated. So if one were to measure the charge, one would see higher charges consistently eminating from areas of high stress (like the San Andreas), but that wouldn't tell us anything we don't already know, in the same way that you can see the two semis are pushing on each other, but you don't know when a tire is going to pop and change the whole situation instantly. I'm not aware of a mechanism that would produce a sudden increase in stress days before an earthquake, allowing the charges in question to increase noticeably enough to provide warning.

Not saying it isn't there, but wondering if anyone out there has an answer.

Jeff Frey,

Agreed, the BBC article was well-written and balanced. I'm also curious whether the researchers have looked for these charge anomolies in locations and times NOT associated with earthquakes.

The ultimate point they need to address is bulletproof reliability. Even if there is a tenous link that can be proven, realistically that's useless and possibly counter-productive unless it's entirely reliable. No public official is going to order evacuations or other meaningful moves without that absolute belief in the method; it only takes one bad false alarm to damage forecasting and public safety efforts for a generation.

So this can remain in the realm of "cool science", but it has no public policy value unless that ironclad reliability can be proven.

If they have not looked for these disturbances at times when there are no earthquakes nearby, so that they can show these are uniquely related to earthquakes, then they are sloppy scientists and publicity hounds. If they have looked but aren't telling us about it (because they can't show there is anything unique), then they are frauds. Only if they have demonstrated that these observations are uniquely related to earthquakes, or at a minimum highly correlated with earthquake occurrence (such as, found before earthquakes and very rarely found at other times so that the probability of occurrence by chance is small enough), does this satisfy the standards of science and make it up to the realm of "cool science". I've seen some posters that Friedemann Freund presented at meetings, and I was not greatly impressed. But if they have something real this time they should be publishing it soon, so I will keep my eyes out for it.

Not sure if anyone's still checking this, but I ran the article by a geophysicist/seismologist friend of mine and got the following reply (in part);

"... several studies have looked at the change in the electrical conductivity across faults and find that the conductivity does change as one maps it across the actively deforming region.  This could be the source of their mechanism; the change in electrical conductivity is primarily from fluids within the porous  

damage zone within the fault.  It might be they are seeing the mobilization of these fluids as the fault starts approaching some critical stress point (i.e. the closing of pore space and expulsion  

of fluid as it "locks")."

Jeff, to me many oddball things can be "cool science" in the sense of throwing out an idea to be tested and explore, whether or not it has been proven. It does seem that in this case they're putting the cart before the horse in designing satellites without testing some of their most basic assumptions, but I like to keep a wide view of scientific possibility. That being said, I know that it rankles for a sloppy or news-hungry researcher to get air time over responsible, careful scientists.

Out of curiosity, what's your opinion of Discover magazine? I have a split reaction; on one hand, it gives me access to lots of neat happenings in science that I can quickly skim, as opposed to something like American Scientist which is high quality but takes time and concentration I don't always have. On the other hand, Discover seems to revel in highlighting fringe, oddball folks who are dancing on the line between legitimately pushing the envelope and being well-meaning cranks. (You may also share my annoyance at Discover's blindness to any earth science story not involving CO2).