Dark Day for Science

Today is a very bad day for seismology and for all of science.  If you have not already heard, 6 Italian seismologists, including the Director of the National Earthquake Center, and the past-president of the National Institute of geophysics, were convicted of manslaughter, along with a former governmental official.  The charges resulted from the belief that scientists were too reassuring in the aftermath of a couple of small tremors that turned out to be foreshocks of the deadly L'Aquila quake in 2009.

Many earth system behaviors are inherently chaotic, earthquakes included. These behaviors are, as a result, inherently unpredictable.  There are small earthquakes more or less continuously in the Apennines, the modern front line of the ongoing collision between the African and Eurasian plates.  The vast majority of these small quakes will be the harbingers of... nothing at all.  When to issue a warning to the public is one of the most fundamental problems of earthquake hazards.  Raise the alert level every time there is a minor tremor and pretty soon, people begin to ignore the alerts.  Fail to issue an alert until you are sure there will be a quake and you might as well not have a warning system because you will never be sure.  There is no research that says just how to walk this tightrope between too much warning and too little warning. This is the trap the Italian seismologists have found themselves in.  The authorities, blessed with hindsight, have essentially said, "See, you had warning signs, you should have told every one."

A magnitude 5.5 earthquake happened just yesterday on the San Andreas fault in central California.  Should Californians have been warned to evacuate because this is potentially a foreshock?  Most of us would agree that this would be foolhardy.  M 5 quakes happen regularly along the San Andreas and related fault systems in California without presaging anything.  Yet one day, one of those shocks might very well be the foreshock of a much larger quake, one that wreaks devastation across a wide area.  What is the responsible thing to do?  Who should decide how much warning is appropriate? 

Those convicted in Italy are among the top seismologists in the world. Even if these convictions are overturned, they will definitely inhibit important research in one of the most seismically active parts of the world.  At this point the Italians have essentially guaranteed that they will have less information and less potential warning of future quakes, because no sane geophysicist would choose to work there.  This ruling will undoubtedly also have a chilling effect on volcanological research and Italy is also the home of a number of dangerously active volcanoes.  How sad for all involved, but especially how sad for the Italian people who, in the end, need more information, not less, in order to live as safely as they can in their active homeland.