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Over The Horizon

Predicting Quakes

Four Chinese seismologists are spending the next two months in New Zealand testing their theories on forecasting earthquakes. The work is expected to be of significant benefit to New Zealand's own earthquake forecasting programme which is being developed by scientists at Victoria University and the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences.

New Zealand earthquake records since the early 1980s are among the best in the world, and the Chinese scientists are analysing this information to see if they can find statistical patterns.

The Chinese are leaders in forecasting earthquakes but have had mixed success. Their most notable achievement was predicting a magnitude 7.3 earthquake at Haicheng in 1975. Their warning resulted in 600,000 people being evacuated and many lives were saved.

At present, their forecasting procedures incorporate information from a huge monitoring programme, and process it by combining comprehensive scientific and computing analyses with local expertise and experience.

There is an established protocol for issuing earthquake warnings which remain in place for a few days. If no earthquake occurs within that time, the warning is discontinued.

The work in New Zealand is aimed at using statistical methodology to put more precise numbers onto estimates of time-varying earthquake risk.

Led by senior government seismologist Professor Ma Li, the Chinese scientists are interested in exploring the use of models developed by Professor David Vere-Jones, of Victoria University's Institute of Statistics and Operations Research, and his colleagues, as the basis for such risk estimates. At the same time the methods provide an opportunity for putting their own procedures to a more rigorous quantitative test.

The research is part of an international cooperative programme, sponsored from the New Zealand side by Asia 2000, the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences and Victoria University, and from the Chinese side by the Centre for Analysis and Prediction, the State Seismological Bureau of China and the Graduate School of University of Science and Technology of China.