Personal tools
Document Actions
News from ICTP 83 - Dateline
Charles F. Richter often said that "only charlatans and fools predict earthquakes." You would think that Richter would know. After all, he's the one who created the Richter scale in the 1930s, which is still used by most seismologists to measure the magnitude of earthquakes.
Yet, the scientists who convened last October at the ICTP for the Fourth Workshop on Non-Linear Dynamics and Earthquake Prediction, despite their enthusiasm for earthquake predictions, didn't seem to fit Richter's profile at all.
In fact, Giuliano Francesco Panza, who teaches seismology at the University of Trieste and serves as the local organizer for these workshops, thinks that earthquake forecasting is no longer a foolish dream but an emerging reality.
In 1992, two distinguished Russian scientists who work with the ICTP, Vladimir Keilis-Borok and Vladimir G. Kossobokov, of the International Institute of Earthquake Prediction Theory and Mathematical Geophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, developed a model that has gone five-for-five in predicting earthquakes with a magnitude eight or more. The earthquakes occurred along the Pacific rim in an area stretching from Japan to New Guinea.
The model has since been tested independently in three research centres in Moscow, Menlo Park, California, and Boulder, Colorado.
Moreover, less than 10 years ago these same Russian geophysicists predicted a major earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area, which took place in the fall of 1989.
After the event, the U.S. National Science Foundation, headquartered in Washington, D.C., decided to finance Moscow's upstart earthquake predictors.
The method developed by Keilis-Borok and Kossobokov is based on an empirical analysis of anomalies in weak seismic activities that take place each day. If a significant variation in the seismic background occurs, it means something is happening deep inside the Earth. These variations can then be placed into a mathematical formula that provides important indicators concerning local earthquake risks.
Keilis-Borok and Kossobokov admit that many more confirmations will be necessary before the model gains the full confidence of the scientific community. They also recognise the limits of their methods. "Until now, our predictions anticipate potential activities within a geographic range of 200 to 400 kilometres. Moreover, all these predictions carry an uncertainty from several months to a couple of years."
Despite these limitations, the Russian researchers believe that their "forecasts could prove useful in helping to increase public awareness of the earthquake risks in their localities."
Two of the three scientists sharing the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics-William D. Phillips, of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, of Collège de France and École Normale Supérieure in Paris-have visited the ICTP on several occasions. Cohen-Tannoudji attended Centre workshops in the early 1970s and Phillips was last here in 1992 for the ICTP's winter college in optics.
Together with Steven Chu, of Stanford University in California, Phillips and Cohen-Tannoudji received the Nobel Prize for the development of methods to trap and cool atoms by bombarding them with laser light.
The process "freezes" atoms in one spot, robbing them of their motion and ultimately their capacity to generate heat.
Laser cooling, in fact, can bring atoms to within one-thousandth of a degree above absolute zero, the theoretical temperature at which all atomic motions cease.
1997 Scientific Programme Statistics
4500 Visitor-Months - 70% from developing countries
47 Activities - 75% training courses and workshops
500 Researchers - 70% from developing countries
The ICTP 1997 Scientific Programme included 35 training courses, 3 diploma courses, 8 research activities and the programme for training and research at Italian laboratories. Four of the training courses were held in Argentina, Morocco, Nepal and the Republic of Korea. Each research visit at the Centre averages one month in duration.
Abdul Waheed Khan, an ICTP Regular Associate since 1985 and Senior Associate since 1991, has been appointed Vice Chancellor of Gomal University in Pakistan. The university, which was founded in 1974, is located in the city of Dera Ismail Khan in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. Khan, who is a specialist in high energy physics, has focused his research on such topics as medical physics, ultra-relativistic heavy ion reactions, and quark-gluon plasma. In 1987-1989 and 1996-1997, Khan was awarded fellowships at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Padua, Italy. His INFN appointment took place under the ICTP-directed Programme for Training and Research in Italian Laboratories (TRIL).
Forward
to Profile
