Prediction of quakes unlikely in foreseeable future, says geologist

While the image of earthquake victims falling helplessly into a great crevasse in the ground is largely a myth, there can be no doubting the devastation wrought by yesterday's powerful quake in north-west Turkey.

Even if geologists could have predicted the quake, there would have been no way of preventing it shaking the ground with such violent affects.

As it stands, scientists are unable to predict the time, size and exact location of earthquakes.

According to Dr Chris Bean, a geologist at UCD who has a specialist knowledge of the phenomena, such predictions would be "socially meaningful" only within hours or days of an earthquake happening.

"This probably won't be possible for the foreseeable future," he said.

The epicentre of the carnage in Turkey, in which almost 1,200 people were killed and several thousand injured, occurred in the industrial region of Izmit, which is on an earthquake-prone belt known as the Anatolia fault that runs east to west across much of the country.

Thousands took to the streets in panic when the quake struck at 3.02 a.m. local time (1.02 a.m. Irish time). Measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale, this was the largest quake in Turkey since a tremor measuring 6.3 killed 144 and injured 1,500 people in and around the southern city of Adana in June, 1998.

Shock waves from yesterday's powerful quake were felt in several cities and in the capital Ankara 600 km away.

With fires, communication lines down, electricity cut off, burst water mains and leaking gas, rescue workers faced a daunting task trying to free the injured and dead from the rubble.

"Turkey is a very weak zone on the earth's crust," said Dr Bean. "For the next tens of thousands of years, it will remain a seismically active one. "Basically, buildings have to be built in such a way that they don't shake very well in sympathy with the shaking ground associated with the quake."

Other earthquake-prone regions, such as California in the US and Japan, have very strict regulations on the control of buildings, said Dr Bean. Asked about aftershocks - there were about 200 yesterday - Dr Bean said the possibility of further quakes in days to come could not be ruled out. "Recent scientific evidence suggests that earthquakes in a way `communicate' - one big earthquake would trigger another smaller quake further away from the epicentre."

"The danger for buildings is that they become very unstable and the aftershocks knock them down."

The current practice is for scientists to move away from trying to predict when and where an earthquake will strike to estimating the likely strength of an earthquake in a particular zone should one happen, said Dr Bean. This would enable engineers to assess the necessary precautions "within the lifetime of given buildings".

"There's no particular reason why it happened last night," said Dr Bean. "Plates [under on the Earth's crust] move around all the time. We get a build-up of stress and strain in the crust and it's released by the earthquake."

"You cannot stop this happening. There is no prevention."