Some earthquakes are luckily predicted by scientists before it happens while some are bound to take people by surprise. Nonetheless, a seismologist believes that California’s “The Big One” will occur and what only matters is when it will hit.
According to Los Angeles Times, seismologist Lucy Jones aims to let people understand and prepare themselves regarding upcoming earthquakes. Jones then aims to speak effectively to the people to accept the idea of “randomness” and not just rely on scientists to predict possible earthquakes like “The Big One.”
With that said, in a recent conference of the Japan Geoscience Union and the American Geophysical Union, Jones was defined to have spent her entire life studying about people’s attitudes toward tremors as earthquakes. Jones then heed to the people that “The Big One” would indeed rage the Pacific Coast no matter what kind of denial a person thinks. Time and preparedness are only the things that people would need to worry about.
Furthermore, Jones noted that earthquakes possibly like “The Big One” didn’t happen because Chinese people just knew more about foreshocks that they could predict evacuations necessary ahead of an earthquake. "They used the basic principle quantified more than a century ago: One earthquake makes another earthquake more likely, and guessed that having a swarm of over 500 events made a big earthquake even more likely," Jones explained on Sputnik News.
Jones mentioned that announcing things about “The Big One” and other earthquakes doesn’t make any people feel safer. Yet, scientists to just simply tell the people things that they are sure of will make the people think thoroughly that they need to prepare no matter what. She then thinks that fostering fool proof information to the people will make society safer.
Rest assured, aside from “The Big One” warning, the U.S. Geological Society is set to launch an early earthquake warning signal system to warn people of the upcoming tremor through their electronic devices. Hence, minutes or seconds provided by the warning system could save lives.
