This partial was in the London New Statesman in Feb of this year...for the full text I suggest you write me (earth@televar.com) as it is a copywritten piece.:

"Why can't scientists warn us about earthquakes such as the one that struck in Gujarat, western India, killing possibly as many as 100,000 people? Why is it - if astronomers can see nearly to the edge of the universe and biologists can clone living organisms- that the science of geophysics cannot tell us when and where the earth will start shaking?
What is most peculiar about this situation is that the basic earthquake process is conceptually simple. The continental plates are great fragments of the earth's crust which float on a liquid mantle like gigantic rafts. Wherever two of these rub shoulders - as they do all along the San Andreas fault in California, for instance - they tend to stick together. But slowly, as continents drift, the rocks get twisted out of shape and, when the stress builds up beyond a certain threshold, something finally gives and there is an earthquake.
So, it seems, it shouldn't be too difficult to tell where and when the big events will take place. This isn't quantum physics. Even so, the tragedy in India reminds us that the record of earthquake prediction research is truly dismal. There has never been a single unambiguous success. And there have been many notable failures.
In 1976, for example, a researcher with the US Bureau of Mines predicted that two enormous quakes of magnitude 9.8 and 8.8 on the Richter scale would strike off the coast of Peru in August 1981 and May 1982. He also predicted a foreshock of magnitude 7.5 to 8 for June 1981. When the foreshock didn't happen, he retracted his prediction, but the Peruvian government was thrown into such a scare that an official of the US Geological Survey had to travel there to calm fears."