Earthquakes can lead to fires as well as other destruction Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
We might be able to predict big earthquakes in the near future better than we thought, according to research that used machine learning to analyse decades of past earthquakes in California.
There have been many attempts to predict earthquakes using real-world signals, such as changing water levels, or data catalogues, such as the time intervals between earthquakes, but there has been no consistently reliable method.
One leading seismological hypothesis, first proposed in the 1970s, was that predictability based …
Article amended on 30 August 2022
We have corrected the size of the area modelled in the earthquake risk assessments.
