THE faint sound of crashing waves can travel across continents through Earth’s rocks. Now it seems this ambient hum can be harnessed to help predict how destructive an earthquake will be.
Estimating the degree to which the ground will shake during a quake of a given magnitude is tricky because seismic waves can be muffled or amplified by geological structures en route from the epicentre, such as sedimentary basins.
According to Gregory Beroza and Germán Prieto of Stanford University in California, you can predict these effects using measurements of the ambient hum. They were able to see how the underlying…
