Dr. Osama Gazal

Earthquakes started or is it an accident? Why don't we renounce conflicts and choose humanity to help displace people? They're appearing Many investigations On February 6, enormous earthquakes measuring 7.8 and 7.5 struck southern Turkey and western Syria, killing at least 52,000 people, 120,000 injured, and displacing millions. NASA earth observatory satellite images show "the scale of destruction in Turkey and Syria is comparable to the 1906 very large and powerful earthquakes that destroyed San Francisco. While the influence of the lateral movement resulted in a 3-meter divergence in Turkey, implying that Turkey has moved closer to Europe." NASA says.

After this disaster, scientists all over the world reactivated to solve the most essential unknown point surrounding earthquakes, and people waited for them to provide solutions and clear explanations. Can earthquakes be anticipated early by geological studies that use statistical or machine learning analyses, or will it be a perplexing issue!? As a result, the pessimistic attitude that earthquakes are unpredictable cast a shadow over the challenge of earthquake prediction. According to the self-organized criticality (SOC) theory, as well as the seeming incapacity to recognize reliable antecedents of significant earthquakes, it has become a widely accepted scientific paradigm that earthquakes are, to some extent, chaotic phenomena. For decades, attempts to forecast earthquakes were explored and done mostly on a statistical basis, employing the foundations of statistical geophysics. While a very promising approach, the theory of Chaotic Synchronizations was applied in Seismology in the previous three decades, bringing hope that the earthquake may be predicted in a range of time.

Long historical scientific research and studies in structural geology and tectonics, as well as the recent studies in the synchronizations of seismic chaos and earthquake predictability, are still unable to construct early earthquake warning systems, but several important characteristics of the repeating earthquake series can help us to reduce the effects of earthquakes by planning and preparing for this natural disaster by implementing several procedures and steps before and during the disaster. Anyhow, the latest dilemma nowadays is how to build a coherent theory of earthquakes that would generalize the facts and concepts generated by seismologists’ scientists, and authors over the past century. These seismologists' topological and time-series investigations indicated that earthquakes throughout the world show indications of such synchronization. And despite a rapidly increasing understanding of earthquakes and seismic patterns, one of the most important unsolved challenges in geophysics is earthquake prediction.

Accordingly, two different types of behavior of the “seismic oscillators” are known so far Periodic, and Geometric.

The concept of the Periodic Earthquakes, periodic oscillations, and their synchronization, or at least quasiperiodic earthquakes is well known in seismology in the form of the concept of characteristic earthquakes (The characteristic earthquake model). It is believed that Repeating Earthquake Sequences (RES), repeaters, or multiples result from repeating ruptures of the same or nearly the same patch of fault. These sequences provide a useful case for understanding the earthquake cycle and interactions, given the nature of the fixed source and quasiperiodic recurrences. Several studies were performed to analyze the characteristics of the recurrence time of the earthquakes within the repeating earthquake sequences. Occur in the same location, rupture the same fault length, have identical faulting mechanisms and seismic moments, nucleate at the same hypocenter, propagate in the same direction, and rupture identical patches of the fault. Debate over the reliability of the characteristic earthquake model has been ongoing since it was first proposed while the most important characteristics of the repeating earthquake series are (according to a detailed review by Dr. Jure Zalohar 2018):

a. Recurrence time and/or frequency of events in some repeating earthquake sequences change over time according to Omori’s law
b. Some repeating earthquake sequences indicate the migration of seismic activity in a chain-like way
c. The recurrence times are inversely related to the fault's average slide rate.
d. Rong et al. (2003) reported that forecasts of large earthquakes around the Pacific Rim since 1990 performed worse than random Poisson forecasts. This model also did not survive the statistical testing
e. The number of events in recurrent earthquake series ranges from three to seven (Chen et al., 2007, 2009), and in some cases up to nine.

Geometric Earthquakes: Another form of behavior of "seismic oscillators" was described by Kobayashi et al. (2003), who witnessed an earthquake series during the 2000 Miyakejima volcanic activity in Japan. On the 11th and 12th of July, an uncommon earthquake series with distinct traits was detected. Thus, Kobayashi et al. (2003)'s results are compatible with recurrent earthquake sequences (RES). Several studies have found that the RES exhibit either a periodic kind of behavior or an increase or reduction in the recurrence time following Omori's law (e.g., Schaff et al., 1998; Kobayashi et al., 2003; Peng et al., 2005; Nomura et al., 2014). It is worth noting, however, that only Kobayashi et al. (2003) linked the Omori law to a geometric progression in which the recurrence time is linearly proportional to time. The most important characteristics of the Geometric earthquake are:

a) The recurrence time intervals of the earthquakes in the series of occurrences dropped at a consistent pace rate.
b) The linear reduction in the recurrence time of occurrence is compatible with the geometric progression.
c) The linear reduction in the recurrence time is compatible with the geometric progression
d) The central mechanisms of earthquakes in the sequences were similar.
e) The frequency of occurrences within the recorded sequences corresponded to the Omori law for foreshocks or acoustic emission.

Theories are still being developed to assist and link many of the available geophysical data to simulate earthquake occurrence and predict the timing of occurrence or the possibility of recurrence. The Omega Theory is one of the most recent in Seismology and Structural Geology, concluding that these features (numerous well-defined physical characteristics of repeating and geometric earthquake sequences) cannot be coincidences, but rather indicate the existence of some fundamental underlying earthquake physics. The name Omega-Theory comes from the fact that all rotations and cellular structures of the Cosserat medium are often indicated by the Greek letter Ω. However, the scope of the Ω-Theory far exceeds that of the Cosserat theory, encompassing many other topics of theoretical physics, geophysics, and geology, including plate tectonics, synchronization of chaotic systems, solitons, and fractals, mathematical set theory, and quantum mechanics. Theories are still being developed, and statistical and scientific approaches and the application of artificial intelligence require a lot of attention to comprehend what earthquakes are and strive to lessen their impacts as well as identify the time of their occurrence so that we can make preparations.

Not because the core of my research interest is in the field of Hydrogeological and Environmental Applied Engineering, but according to a comprehensive historical analysis of all-natural disasters, earthquakes account for around 10.13% of them, placing them third on the list of the most common natural disasters after floods and storms disasters (approximately 89% are water-related disasters inflict a far greater toll on human life and property than earthquake damages). By assessing the global death from natural disaster records, earthquakes account for approximately 10.3 of them, ranking it third on the list of lethal natural disasters following floods. While drought disasters account for the biggest number of depths, it has been ranked the world's worst disaster for ages. Earthquakes, on the other hand, continue to be one of the world's major natural disasters, and despite the rarity of an earthquake of this magnitude in the world, this type of earthquake, which caused a severe tremor in the area near the surface earthquake's epicenter, is a commonly expected event in areas of faults and long and wide slip faults located on the borders of tectonic plates.

Earthquakes, despite the often-catastrophic destruction they cause, are evidence that our planet is still pulsing with life and that there are still latent energies within it, just as our bodies remain in perpetual motion until the secret of life arises from us, and then we become corpses, as the earth is still alive the earthquakes will occur!

The writer is Director of the Water Innovation and Research Unit (WIRU).