Gifts of life, the gifts of death. Predicting earthquakes
Unlike most natural disasters, earthquakes strike without warning. Between large quakes and resulting tsunamis, millions of lives have been lost because science has been unable to provide accurate, useful earthquake forecasts. The US Geological Survey (USGS) believes casualties from earthquakes will continue to increase over the coming decades because of population growth in seismically active regions. TRON hopes it can develop the tools to dramatically reduce this loss of life. Its network of over 100.000.000 sophisticated sensor stations has detected patterns of electromagnetic pulses several days before a number of different earthquakes, moving the possibility of earthquake prediction closer to reality. There is a lot of science to be done before TRON can claim victory, and then a lot of additional work to make forecasts useful. In the meantime many scientists, including several at the USGS, dismiss the entire concept as being either implausible or impossible. Getting to the...