US seismologists have new approach to earthquake prediction

For the past 20 years, getting an earthquake scientist to utter the word "prediction" has been about as tough as getting a biologist to endorse the existence of Bigfoot.

The quest to identify reliable precursors to ground shaking has turned up one dead end after another, from moon phases to radon gas and animal behaviour. Many seismologists are convinced that prediction is impossible because the factors that trigger quakes are so complex.

But a pair of professors at the University of California, Santa Cruz, say it's time to take another look.

In an article on Thursday in the journal Science, seismologists Emily Brodsky and Thorne Lay say that recent megaquakes in Japan and Chile suggest that offshore faults - like the one that runs along the coast of North America's Pacific Northwest - may chatter and creep before they rupture catastrophically.

Called subduction zones, such faults generate the world's most powerful earthquakes, along with deadly tsunami.

Brodsky said it was the monster quake and tsunami off Japan's Tohoku coast in 2011 that made her reconsider her ingrained cynicism about quake prediction.