EARTH.COM - Nobody can tell you exactly when an earthquake will hit. But a team of scientists has gotten remarkably good at answering a different question: where.
Their new method, developed at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), flags the specific stretches of major earthquake faults where stress has been quietly piling up for years.
The first major test of the method shows that it can identify the stretches of a fault where dangerous amounts of strain have accumulated.
The research was led by UCR geophysicists Gareth Funning and Axel Periollat, who have spent their careers watching how Earth’s crust bends and shifts as tectonic plates lock together in the long buildup before they finally give way.