The Last of the Earthquake Predictors
In late winter of 1975, a seismologist named Cao Xianqing tracked a series of small earthquakes near Haicheng, China, which he took to presage a much larger one to come. On the morning of February 3, officials ordered evacuations of the surrounding communities. Despite the subfreezing weather, many residents abandoned their homes, although others refused, dismissing the warning as another cry of “wolf” in a string of false alarms.
Yet this time, around dinnertime the very next day, Cao’s prognosis materialized in the form of a massive, magnitude 7.3 quake. Bridges collapsed, pipes ruptured, and buildings crumbled. But the accurate early alert—the first ever documented—spared thousands of lives: Of the 150,000 casualties predicted for a disaster of comparable size, only about 25,000 were tallied, including just over 2,000 deaths.
The successful forecast of the Haicheng quake seemed to justify the optimism felt by earthquake researchers around the world, who believed they were on the brink of unlocking the secrets of Earth’s tectonic motion. Just a few years earlier, in 1971, geophysicist Don Anderson, who headed the California Institute of Technology’s renowned Seismology Laboratory, had boasted that prediction science would soon pay big dividends. With enough funds, he told a local reporter, “it would in my opinion be possible to forecast a quake in a given area within a week.”
Those funds duly arrived. In 1978, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) allocated over half its research budget ($15.76 million) to earthquake prediction, a level of spending that continued for much of the next decade. Scientists deployed hundreds of seismometers and other sensors, hoping to observe telltale signals heralding the arrival of the next big one. They looked for these signs in subterranean fluids, crustal deformations, radon gas emissions, electric currents, even animal behavior. But every avenue they explored led to a dead end.
In one sudden and
