Hello Roger,

Your example reminds of two things Dr. Leon Knopoff showed me when I visited him. The first example he showed me was in breaking plastic silverware. You hold the ends and pull down so there is an arch in the middle and keep applying more pressure until the plastic silverware piece breaks. Actually it snaps at that point.

The next one was in a drawing a fault segment. He said the asperities were like teeth on a comb and as they continually moved, the teeth begin to break and as time goes by, eventually you are left with fewer teeth (asperities) and then there is nothing left to hold the fault in place and with pressure, it moves.

If we know that faults make an electrical sound prior to moving, then that means the rocks inside the fault are breaking prior to actual surface movement. Other precursory phenomena also are occuring, say within a ten day period before the earthquake. Water levels can change, oil is another one thats interesting. I recall Lucy Jones in one of her videos showing how after Northridge occurred the oil that was once below this hill she was standing on, was now present and coming out of fissures in the hillsides. Of course in nature we see geyser changes, animals run away, birds change flying patterns and sometimes, snakes head out for places they don't usually travel.

Seems to me, as all of these are natural elements, taking those alongside the instrumentation shows us, qualified seismologists should be able to predict earthquakes. The greatest problem I see in this effort is in the actual method of looking to work on earthquake prediction as a singular effort, it hasn't come about yet. People who do work on it still have other responsibilities and thus, this singular effort by a team or group hasn't occurred yet.

Some will say I am wrong in citing the Parkfield Project, however, I'd like to discount it for one main reason. It was studied because it had what they considered timed interval earthquakes. What I am proposing is to have an area that is far more active and primed for an earthquake of a 6 or better. Lets for instance look at a known seismic gap location. In our Bay Area, there are several known. The peninsula of San Francisco, The Hayward Fault and the lower segment of the Rodgers Creek Fault are three good locations.

So how would a trained person know if they were focused on a seismic gap? Earthquake clustering of course is good. Study of b-value has some importance. Earthquakes around a 5 magnitude as a precursor. GPS measuring ground movement. A host of others I haven't begin to touch upon.

Not unlike astronomers who are looking for meteors and comets, seismologists who are looking for trace elements that say an earthquake is about to be delivered, have an equal opportunity in finding the locations.

Frasier Smith accidentally discovered ultra low frequency prior to Loma Prieta and its now documented. What does Charlotte King hear? Ultra low frequency. There are plenty of reasons to believe earthquakes can be predicted and more are being added every day. When the next big quake rattles either the Bay Area of the LA Basin, chances are that with the high level of technical data gathering devices, it won't come as a surprise at all. But will it be in foresight or hindsight? Time will tell.

Petra