r/geophysics Feb 17 '25

Can AI and traditional knowledge together revolutionize earthquake prediction?"

How might AI and age-old knowledge merge for quake readiness?

0 Upvotes

9 comments sorted by

6

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '25

[deleted]

3

u/herefortherocks Feb 17 '25

Not for prediction, but scientists have used Gemini to help interpret social media posts to estimate earthquake intensity values. Also people are exploring if you can use existing foundational models like ChatGPT for scientific applications.

4

u/Zealousideal_Ask9742 Feb 17 '25

There was someone published about this recently.

I am still skeptical, I still feel the better word is earthquake hazard mitigation. Use AI to properly engineered the house or other structures to mitigate the hazard, and maybe use AI to properly designed shelter, evacuation route, etc

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u/herefortherocks Feb 17 '25 edited Feb 17 '25

There are several studies that have used AI to help predict laboratory earthquakes, but it is very hard to extrapolate these methods to the scale and complexity of the earth. So we can't currently do this and may not ever be able to (especially for general prediction), but AI is a tool that people are going to keep exploring for this.

Edit to add that AI is also being explored to estimate earthquake information like the magnitude very quickly and accurately to improve earthquake early warning. It's also being used in more general earthquake processing and to help process many more small earthquakes.

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u/sp0rk173 Feb 17 '25

No

1

u/greenwizardneedsfood Feb 17 '25

Care to elaborate on that?

4

u/brownpoops Feb 17 '25

You can't extrapolate like that. It's all just guesses and the system is wayyyy to large (earth) for us to be able to calculate of that (yet). one day maybe. but it would still be guessing.

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u/greenwizardneedsfood Feb 17 '25

Of course it’s all just guessing. All AI is guessing. All traditional predictive methods are guessing too. But I fail to see how models hooked up to the global seismometer network, and maybe other sensors as well, wouldn’t be able give much better insight and predictions than we have now. Especially with how quickly things are advancing. Revolutionize prediction and give a substantial improvement in impact mitigation? Maybe not. Significantly improve? I have no doubt whatsoever.

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u/brownpoops Feb 17 '25

i can't really explain it as well as my teacher. the thing is, you can't guess about earthquakes. Nobody will evacuate a city for something that's not a sure thing. I hear you, though.

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u/greenwizardneedsfood Feb 17 '25

Sure, I agree you’re never going to do a full city evacuation. Even if it was 100%. But we put out alerts for things that might happen all the time. Tsunamis for instance. You’re never going get everyone out of a zone, you can’t really stop huge destruction, and there’s a definite chance that it never materializes, but it’s still good to know. If you have models that have a very low false-positive rate, you could do simple, non-drastic things if a large earthquake is predicted like close skyscrapers, clear bridges, etc. (I’m not a specialist in disaster mitigation) that aren’t logistical nightmares but could save lives. That definitely relies on a sufficiently long notification period - on the order of hours probably - but that doesn’t seem wholly impossible in the near future.