Evaluation of Proposed Earthquake Precursors

AGU's Evaluation of Proposed Earthquake Precursors presents the first results of a project carried out by the International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's Interior (IASPEI) to evaluate claims about precursors to earthquakes. Only three of 28 nominations were accepted for the Preliminary List of Significant Precursors that IASPEI is compiling for the International Decade for Natural Hazards Reduction. The project's purpose is to build a consensus among the scientific community as to which phenomena may be real precursors and useful for earthquake prediction studies. Because the spectrum of opinion on significant precursors is so broad, evaluation is crucial; some researchers believe that hundreds of significant precursor case histories exist, while others reject all that have been presented.