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xkcd #3165: Earthquake Prediction Flowchart
Title text:
At least people who make religious predictions of the apocalypse have an answer to the question 'Why didn't you predict any of the other ones that happened recently?'
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3165/
Thats my same basic argument against ghosts. If they were real scientists would be all over it, trying to be the first to trap one in a jar to power a dynamo
The world's seismologists: "We've figured it out! The next earthquake will be"
Me: "Nope not listening"
...Is this like a issue now? Are people selling timings to earthquakes?
I live in Iceland and we try to predict volcanic activity all the time and it's off by weeks or months. To be fair, that's a blink of an eye on a geological scale so it's pretty accurate but the nature of the problem is that you have so many forces that all interact with each other.
It's pretty similar to "how far can you tip the chair back before it falls" but we don't know the size, weight and shape of the chair really well. You just need one fracture in the rock from previous earthquake to throw all the calculations off.
I don't know the context of the post but I imagine it's media related, like a seismologist saying "could be as soon as tomorrow" and the journalist just saying "earthquake tomorrow". Also seismologist don't shut up is true.
I visited Iceland a couple years ago, loved the way everyone in Iceland discusses geology by default the same way we in the uk discuss the weather.
Possibly that was partly because blue lagoon was directly over a predicted eruption at the time 🤷♂️