Tiny seismic rumbles can warn that human activities such as fracking are putting enough stress on underground faults to trigger a larger earthquake.
Analyses of a decade of seismic data from Alberta’s Western Canada Sedimentary Basin shows that 92 percent of earthquakes induced by fracking were preceded by smaller foreshocks, researchers report August 27 in Science . But there are many lingering uncertainties about why and how these foreshocks occur, the team notes. That means that, while still useful as short-term warnings, foreshocks may produce both false positive and false negative earthquake predictions.
We summarize the week’s scientific…
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