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Presented a summary of partnering opportunities at the senior staff meeting of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, Tokyo, Japan, held at Waseda University on thursday March 7.  Then over to the US Embassy, Tokyo, to inform staffers there of the summer school to be conducted at Tohoku University in July (?) 2013.  Summer school will be for administrators and policy makers as planned at this time.  A field trip to the tsunami inundation area will also be held.  A great time and place to learn about disasters and what we can do about them.

This morning I got up at 5:00 am to drive down to San Francisco to catch a flight to Tokyo on my way to Sendai, Japan.  The Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU), an organization of the 42 leading universities around the Pacific Rim, are meeting next week in Tokyo to, in part, approve the plan to move ahead with the APRU MultiHazards Initiative.  To be headquartered at Tohoku University, the idea is to bring together the leading minds around the Pacific Rim to partner in the solution of problems relating to great disasters such as the March 11, 20

Have you read about that meteor that blew up over Russia a few days ago? Amazing. A rock from space hasn’t caused serious damage and human injury since  --- I don’t know -- the days of Christopher Columbus. True, a similar but bigger meteor exploded over Siberia in 1908, but that area was virtually uninhabited.

Plans are afoot to produce lesson plans for educational purposes involving earthquakes and other natural hazards.  As a simple example, I posted a set of slides on the gallery section of this web site.  You can find them here or you can find them through the galleries.  They can be easily downloaded for use as needed.

A colleague just sent along a link to a web site that plans to preserve the history and personal stories associated with the September 4, 2010 M7.1 Christchurch NZ earthquake, and the February 22, 2011 M6.3 Canterbury, NZ earthquake.  You can find the link here.  An excellent way to preserve knowledge about these events and may well aid in helping to prevent similar disasters in the future.

Now its easier than ever to make a forecast for your location.  Just go to the "Personal Earthquake Forecast" on the Tools tab, or go here.  Enter the location where you want to make the forecast.  Click on "Go".  That's all.

One of the advantages of hindsight is that what seemed obscure in the past becomes obvious (here I recommend Duncan Watt's NY Times bestseller: "Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer").  We can see an example of this in the earthquake forecast that we run on this web site.  The NTW method, upon which the global forecast is based, was first developed and published in the peer reviewed literature [1] as a regional forecast over areas the size of California + Nevada.  An assumption implicit in this approach is that earthquakes

It wasn't the great earthquake in Japan, but the epicenter did land in a region that was identified as a high probablity location. Tsunami warning has been issued.  Figures (screenshots) below.  More details later. Probability of an M>8 in the blue polygon in Figure 1 was estimated as 6.2% within 3 years.  Reasonably high, but not nearly as high as Japan.

Figure 1

If you’ve been reading John’s blog, you know that he is forecasting a large earthquake near Japan “sometime soon”. 

Have you heard of the term ‘card counting’?  Strategists employ the technique to predict the outcome of the casino game “21”. Well, John is basically ‘quake counting’.

All around the world, earthquake statistics follow a fairly universal pattern. 

(A) If in a given region over a given period of time you have experienced a certain number of magnitude 5 quakes,  then you’d expect one of magnitude 6.

Over the weekend I received an email from a colleague, Professor Vladimir ("Volodya") Kossobokov, who works at the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris.  Professor Kossobokov has been a close colleague of Professor Vladimir Keilis-Borok, who is famous for having initiated studies of pattern recognition applied to earthquakes, US presidential elections (along with Allan Lichtman at the American University in Washington, DC) and other areas of interest to forecasters.