Earthquake prediction: a critical review

Earthquake prediction research has been conducted for over 100 years with no obvious successes. Claims of breakthroughs have failed to withstand scrutiny. Extensive searches have failed to find reliable precursors. Theoretical work suggests that faulting is a non-linear process which is highly sensitive to unmeasurably fine details of the state of the Earth in a large volume, not just in the immediate vicinity of the hypocentre. Any small earthquake thus has some probability of cascading into a large event. Reliable issuing of alarms of imminent large earthquakes appears to be effectively impossible.