After more than a century of effort, geophysicists still can’t predict when and where earthquakes will occur. Some have suggested that it may even be impossible.
But UK and Chinese geophysicists say they have a new approach to seismic monitoring that should allow forecasting of the time, size and sometimes the location of earthquakes. Their evidence suggests geophysicists could give perhaps an hour’s warning before a small quake, or months before a big one, Nature said.

Evidence suggests geophysicists could give perhaps an hourÕs warning before a small quake, or months before a big one.

Stuart Crampin of the University of Edinburgh and his colleagues say that the key is to stop fixating on specific geological faults, and to take a wider view.
A fault itself does not contain the information needed to make accurate forecasts, but that information can be gleaned by looking at the stresses within several hundred kilometers of a fault, they say.
“In the past,“ says Crampin, “earthquake prediction research has either tried to investigate the earthquake source or tried to recognize statistical patterns in earthquake occurrence,“ he says. “After 120 years of investigation, both attempts have been notably unsuccessful.“ Since ’prediction’ tends to imply one of these old approaches, Crampin and colleagues instead call their method “stress-forecasting“.
The new method exploits a phenomenon called shear-wave splitting, in which seismic ’shear’ waves traveling through rocks are split into two components, which vibrate parallel and perpendicular relative to microscopic cracks. These two shear wave components travel through the ground at different speeds, and so reach detectors at different times.
The alignment of these microscopic cracks reflects the amount of stress in the Earth’s crust. The more stress, the more the cracks are aligned, and the bigger the gap between the two waves’ arrival.
In the past, researchers have gauged the build-up of strain in earthquake zones indirectly, by looking at satellite maps of surface ground movement. But this gives only a rough idea of the stress changes deeper down, where earthquakes originate. Stresses have also been monitored directly at fault lines, but such localized data doesn’t show when and where slippage will occur. “Local effects are chaotic and unpredictable,“ says Crampin.
In October 1999, seismic stations in southwest Iceland reported an increase in shear-wave splitting time delays at a rate similar to that seen before a magnitude 5.1 earthquake four months earlier.
Crampin and his colleagues forecast that another quake of this magnitude would happen ’soon’, or a magnitude-6 within three months. There was a magnitude-5 quake three days later.
This offered a hint that shear-wave splitting might be providing important information. After further work, Crampin and his colleagues now say that detailed monitoring can make more accurate forecasts of time, size and place.

Every year in the United States, about 40,000 people suffer sports-related eye injuries, says the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO), which recommends that all athletes wear appropriate, sports-specific eye protection properly fitted by an eye-care professional.
Lenses made from polycarbonate materials offer the highest level of impact protection, HealthDay reported. These lenses can withstand the force of a ball or other projectile traveling at 90 miles per hour, according to the AAO. “It’s absolutely necessary for athletes to use protective eyewear because eye injuries can be devastating,“ Dr. Ruth Williams, a glaucoma specialist at the Wheaton, Ill., Eye Clinic and an AAO clinical correspondent, said in a prepared statement. “Unfortunately, many athletes feel they don’t need protective eyewear or that injuries are uncommon.“
Examples of sports-related eye injuries include corneal abrasions, eyelid bruising, retinal detachment and internal bleeding. Consequences can include infection and vision loss, and people who’ve suffered eye injuries have an increased risk of developing glaucoma.
“Wearing properly fitted protective eyewear will not harm your performance in a game, and it may save your sight,“ Williams said.
Because eye protection isn’t mandatory in most children’s sports leagues, parents need to make sure their children wear eye protection.

The simple life of bacteria is a little less simple than you might have thought. New research shows that colonies of Escherichia coli can demonstrate a form of learning.
Such bacterial colonies can evolve the ability to anticipate changes in their immediate environment, say researchers led by Saeed Tavazoie at Princeton University in New Jersey, Nature said.
Other types of bacteria could too. This skill could give them the edge over other bacteria that merely adapt themselves to current conditions.
E. coli colonies, for example, can develop the ability to associate higher temperatures (as found in a human mouth, for example) with a lack of oxygen (as found inside the human gut). When exposed to higher temperatures, they alter their metabolism in anticipation of lowering oxygen levels.
This result is unexpected, Tavazoie explains. “For as long as people have been studying the behavior of bacteria, they have assumed that responses to environmental stimuli occur in an actionÐreaction fashion,“ he says. This concept, often known as homeostasis, has dominated the field for a century, he says.
“What we have found is that homeostasis is not the whole story,“ Tavazoie says. Bacteria can learn to respond in a way that is more complex than a simple reaction to current conditions; it anticipates future conditions.