Hi All. The wall that was built up around the “P” word is starting to crumble. What is the “P” word you ask? It is “prediction” and to be more specific it is earthquake prediction. Does this mean that there are going to be earthquake predictions soon. Nope. No one is even close to making a prediction. Don in creepy town

The following is from Nature, Published online: 27 October 2004; | doi:10.1038/4311032a
Earthquake prediction: A seismic shift in thinking
David Cyranoski

David Cyranoski is Nature's Asian-Pacific correspondent.

Earthquake researchers in the United States have long shunned the word 'prediction'. But, thanks to improved data and a change in public perception, cracks are beginning to appear in their resolve. David Cyranoski tracks the debate.

At last month's meeting of the Southern California Earthquake Center in Palm Springs, a certain word was whispered in corridors or condemned with expletives in cocktail-party conversations. On slides during talks it was written only as the 'p-word'.

You wouldn't think the term 'prediction' could provoke such strong reactions. But for earthquake researchers, it's perhaps easy to see why it does. The early history of earthquake predictions featured scientists studying animal behavior and watching the night skies for strange lights. Even when seismic studies came along, predictions were more often wrong than right. Disillusioned, and wary that false predictions would cause more damage than they would prevent, researchers — particularly in the United States — turned their backs on the word and the concept.

"There was a lot of bad science calling itself prediction," says seismologist Lucille Jones, who is in charge of the southern California area for the United States Geological Survey (USGS). "People wanted to dissociate themselves from it."

But prediction is coming back into researchers' vocabularies, if not into fashion. Most of the credit — or the blame, depending on your position — goes to Vladimir Keilis-Borok of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), whose recent predictions ignited public concern and interest1. UCLA's controversial press release describing his prediction of an earthquake in southern California attracted huge media attention. The quake never hit, but the episode resuscitated the p-word and brought the field into the media spotlight. "It's like we're doing experiments with the public looking over our shoulder," says Tom Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

• Earthquake Prediction