Talk:3165: Earthquake Prediction Flowchart
Gettin pretty sick of the "citation needed" joke appearing in early drafts of our explanations. It's not clever to just say that at random. [citation needed] 69.5.140.194 03:14, 8 November 2025 (UTC)
It turns out I suddenly find myself... needing to know the plural of apocalypse. -- Riley Finn, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ... Jordan Brown (talk) 03:28, 8 November 2025 (UTC)
The return of the flowchart! --DollarStoreBa'alConverse 03:57, 8 November 2025 (UTC)
As early as 1974, there was substantial evidence that earthquakes at least in Southern California were unpredictable. To be more precise, the paper found that if you remove aftershocks, the distribution of earthquakes appeared to follow a Poisson distribution. This is the distribution expected from a "memoryless" process where each event is independent of any earlier event, and where earthquakes have a constant probability of occurring, making them completely impossible to predict.
It may be that not all earthquakes everywhere really work this way, but in the past 50 years, evidence has accumulated only to support this hypothesis. No progress whatsoever has been made in predicting earthquakes, only in reasons to believe they fundamentally cannot be predicted (at least without a lot of inaccessible information regarding strain deep within the earth). EebstertheGreat (talk) 05:16, 8 November 2025 (UTC)
Any examples of people claiming to predict earthquakes? --1234231587678 (talk) 05:25, 8 November 2025 (UTC)
- Ben Davidson of YouTube channel SpaceWeatherNews (formerly Suspicious0bservers) does, and links it to a bunch of other bizarre pseudoscience. 184.75.151.213 08:25, 8 November 2025 (UTC)
There's actually quite a few regular earthquakes. The issue is that they're all small and isolated. Very few people care that some mountains abruptly shift a few dozen microns every month. Many more care about the big ones that are extremely difficult to predict. 24.19.215.69 06:05, 8 November 2025 (UTC)
The point about predicting the apocalypse may be related to a thing earlier this year where a bunch of folks believed that the Rapture was going to happen. Sept 23. My friend was absolutely inundated with people saying it was going to happen. 2601:40D:4282:5380:F806:A8F7:EAF2:A7A1 12:38, 8 November 2025 (UTC)
