Researchers discover way to predict earthquakes with 80% accuracy

 

According to a peer-reviewed study published in the scholarly journal Remote Sensing in May, Israeli researchers have developed a mechanism to forecast earthquakes 48 hours in advance with 80% accuracy.

How did they solve the problem?

The Ariel University and Center for Research & Development Eastern Branch research team was able to assess potential triggers for several significant earthquakes that occurred in the last 20 years by examining changes in the Earth's ionosphere, the thin layer of atmosphere that meets the vacuum of space.

Major earthquakes were identified by the researchers as those that were greater than Mw 6 on the Moment magnitude scale, which gauges an earthquake's size based on seismic displacement.

The team's solution involved using a machine learning support vector machine (SVM) algorithm to determine the electron charge density of the ionospheric total electron content using GPS map data.

They discovered that an earthquake may be predicted with an accuracy of 80% using this approach.

Additionally, with an accuracy rate of 85.7%, the researchers were also able to forecast when there won't be an earthquake in a certain location.

Researchers

Drs. Yuval Reuvani, Li-Ad Gotlieb, and Nimrod Inbar of Ariel University, the Eastern Branch of the Center for Research & Development, and PhD student Said Asali from the Department of Computer Science at Ariel University were the study's principal investigators. Israel's Energy Ministry and Israel Science Foundation provided funding for the study.