Here's another
interesting series of Questions and Answers … A quick summary of the questions (of relevance to this thread .. ie: forecasting/modelling) follow:
Q: What caused it?
Q: Was it a surprise?
Q: You mean there were no hints at all?
Q: There was a lot of seismic activity off Japan's coast last week, including a magnitude 7.2 quake on Wednesday. Should that have been a warning sign?
Q: Should we expect more earthquakes?
Q: Will this change the way scientists look at earthquakes around the world?
Q: Does this change our understanding of earthquakes in Southern California and elsewhere on the West Coast?
Q: This sounds a lot like the 9.3 earthquake that struck Sumatra in 2004, generating a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in 14 countries.
Q: The 1995 Kobe quake in Japan killed more than 6,000 people. Was it almost as big as this one?
This demonstrates the 'traditional' type of questions which put pressure on forecasting models ..
The answers are interesting (I have provided a couple below) but don't really lead to any conclusions (as expected given the nature of the phenomenon, I guess).
Quote:
Q: Should we expect more earthquakes?
A: Aftershocks in the region have been ongoing, including 10 in the first hour alone. Jordan and Hough said that these could be quite damaging and might even create another rupture along the complex system of plate boundaries that extend toward Tokyo.
It's not unusual to see far-flung increases in seismic activity after large earthquakes, Jordan said. In part, that's because the Earth oscillates after a big quake much like when a musician hits a gong, and such vibrations can change the stresses on faults "in a small way."
But Hough said there's no reason to think that this earthquake will trigger a series of other catastrophic quakes around the world. Sometimes it seems like big quakes come in clusters, but it's just a coincidence, she said: "It's not like there's some global supercluster getting out of hand."
Q: Will this change the way scientists look at earthquakes around the world?
A: It already has, by expanding the list of places where magnitude 9 "megaquakes" could happen, Hough said. "We had a sense that these couldn't happen along any subduction zone - that it took a certain geometry, a bigger zone," she said. "One lesson is that these are possible in more places than we thought."
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.. so the field of possible scenarios broadens, rather than converges …
By the way, I'd just like to express my deep concerns for the human tragedy situation over there as well … (its just awful, and I wish I could help).
I think at the end of the day, people will eventually turn to Science for better predictive tools and maybe Engineering knowledge, for protection.
Rgds.