Charles Richter's observation that "only fools and charlatans predict earthquakes," reflects the fact that despite more than 100 years of effort, seismologists remain unable to do so with reliable and accurate results. Meaningful prediction involves specifying the location, time, and size of an earthquake before it occurs to greater precision than expected purely by chance from the known statistics of earthquakes in an area. In this context, "forecasting" implies a prediction with a specification of a probability of the time, location, and magnitude. Two general approaches have been used. In one, the rate of motion accumulating across faults and the amount of slip in past earthquakes is used to infer where and when future earthquakes will occur and the shaking that would be expected. Because the intervals between earthquakes are highly variable, these long-term forecasts are accurate to no better than a hundred years. They are thus valuable for earthquake hazard mitigation, given the long lives of structures, but have clear limitations. The second approach is to identify potentially observable changes in the earth that precede earthquakes. Various precursors have been suggested, and may have been real in certain cases, but none have yet proved to be a general feature preceding all earthquakes or to stand out convincingly from the normal variability of the earth's behavior. However, new types of data, models, and computational power may provide avenues for progress using machine learning that were not previously available. At present, it is unclear whether deterministic earthquake prediction is possible. The frustrations of this search have led to the observation that (echoing Yogi Berra) "it is difficult to predict earthquakes, especially before they happen." However, because success would be of enormous societal benefit, the search for methods of earthquake prediction and forecasting will likely continue.

中文翻译：

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地震断层系统的复杂动力学：地震预报和临近预报的新方法。

查尔斯·里希特（Charles Richter）的观点“只有傻瓜和傻瓜才能预测地震”，这反映了这样一个事实，即尽管进行了100多年的努力，地震学家仍然无法以可靠和准确的结果做到这一点。有意义的预测包括在地震发生之前，以比预期更高的精度指定地震的位置，时间和大小，这完全是偶然的，这是从已知的区域地震统计数据中偶然得出的。在这种情况下，“预测”意味着以时间，位置和大小的概率为指标的预测。已经使用了两种通用方法。在其中一种方法中，跨断层累积的运动速率和过去地震中的滑动量用于推断未来地震发生的地点和时间以及预期的震动。由于两次地震之间的时间间隔变化很大，因此这些长期预报的准确度不会超过一百年。因此，鉴于结构的使用寿命长，它们对于减轻地震危险非常有价值，但有明显的局限性。第二种方法是确定地震前地球上潜在可观察到的变化。已经提出了各种先兆，在某些情况下可能是真实的，但尚未被证明是所有地震发生之前的普遍特征，或从地球行为的正常变化中令人信服地脱颖而出。但是，新型的数据，模型和计算能力可能为使用机器学习的进步提供了以前无法获得的途径。目前，尚不确定确定性地震预报是否可行。这种搜索的挫败感导致观察到（呼应Yogi Berra）“很难预测地震，尤其是在地震发生之前”。但是，由于成功将带来巨大的社会效益，因此可能会继续寻求地震预测和预报方法。