Great Earthquakes Imminent? ........No!
The Daily Express and the Daily Mail for 17 April 2016 both mention the imminence of four Mw>8 earthquakes which they attribute to an imagined conversation with me. I have spoken with neither.
On 22 April in a footnote to a 20 April article, the Express admitted these statements were not words from an actual interview but had been copied from a 6 January 2016 article three months earlier in the Times of India. In late May the Mail agreed also to retract their statement and appends the following to their article:
"In an earlier version of this article, Dr Roger Bilham is quoted as stating 'The current conditions might trigger at least four earthquakes greater than 8.0 in magnitude. And if they delay, the strain accumulated during the centuries provokes more catastrophic mega earthquakes.' This quote was sourced from an article published by the Times of India on 6th January 2016. We are happy to clarify that Dr Bilham did not give an interview or provide this statement."
The Times of India attributed these comments to an opinion in a press release provided to them by Prof. Santosh Kumar, Director of India's National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM) concerning a moderate earthquake on 4 Jan 2016 in Manipur, NE India.
I have spoken neither with Professor Kumar, nor with the Times of India, about the Manipur earthquake.
My alleged comments in newspapers in 2016 about future imminent earthquakes are untrue. I have not spoken with newspaper reporters about future earthquakes. No seismologist in the world would issue a statement that a great earthquake is imminent.
Yellowstone eruption imminent? ............No!
During the week following 17 April quotes from the erroneous Daily Express and Daily Mail articles, were repeated by secondary news sources throughout the world. Terrified people in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Ecuador, and elsewhere wrote and asked for more information about these fictitious future earthquakes. In the following week, articles concerning a pending eruption of the Yellowstone caldera were also citing segments of the Daily Express article in support of their views!
These reports and blogs may all be characterized as speculative nonsense.
Setting the record straight
* Clusters of earthquakes are expected from time to time as part of the normal statistical fluctuation of global earthquake occurrence.
* Modest earthquakes occur everyday somewhere. When earthquakes occur close to urban agglomerations, they tend to make headlines. When they occur beneath the world's oceans far from people, they do not.
* Scientists cannot predict earthquakes.
Irresponsible reporting of scientific findings?
An uncontroversial and well-supported scientific finding cited out of context may have initiated this chain of irresponsible reporting. Studies of the collision between the Indian Plate and the Asian Plate in the Himalaya indicate that the region between Kashmir and Assam slips in great earthquakes. Because the size and number of known historical earthquakes in the past 500 years have not been sufficent to keep up with Himalayan compression, several Mw>8 earthquakes are anticipated (see Mugnier et al., 2015; Bollinger 2016 and Bilham articles below). Such is our ignorance of the timing of these future earthquakes they could occur at any time in the next several hundred years (Bilham & Ambraseys, 2004).
For those interested, here are some details. Schiffman et al. (2013) indicate a range of magnitudes of up to Mw=8.9 overdue in the Kashmir region. Drukpa et al., (2012) discuss the potential for earthquakes of up to Mw=8.8 in the Bhutan Himalaya. Stevens and Avouac (2016) calculate that an earthquake with magnitude equal or greater than Mw9 must occur every thousand years somewhere in the Himalaya. Bollinger et al., (2016) discuss a resemblance between the 1934/2016 Nepal earthquakes and a sequence of earthquakes that started in 1255 and ended in a great earthquake in 1344 in western Nepal, a repeat of which is now considered overdue. In contrast, unsupported arguments have been proposed to limit the size of future Himalayan earthquakes (Srivastava et al., 2012).
References
Bilham, R., V. K. Gaur and P. Molnar (2001),Himalayan Seismic Hazard,Science, 293, 1442-4, 2001.
Bilham R, and N. Ambraseys (2004), Apparent Himalayan slip deficit from the summation of seismic moments for Himalayan earthquakes, 1500-2000, Current Science 2004
Bilham, R., and W. Szeliga (2008).Interaction Between the Himalaya and the Flexed Indian Plate - Spatial Fluctuations in Seismic Hazard in India in the Past Millennium in 2008 Seismic Engineering Conference Commemorating the 1908 Messina and Reggio Calabria earthquake,ed A. Santini and N. Moraci, American Inst. of Physics Conf. Proc., 224-231, 978-0-7354-4/08/ 1020(1), 224-231, (978-0-7354-0542-4/08).
Bollinger, L., P. Tapponnier, S. N. Sapkota and Y. Klinger(2016), Slip deficit in central Nepal: omen for a repeat of the 1344 AD earthquake, Earth Planets and Space, 68(12) DOI 10.1186/s40623-016-0389-1.
Drukpa, D., et al. (2012). GPS constraints on Indo-Asian convergence in the Bhutan Himalaya: Segmentation and potential for a 8.2-8.8 Mw earthquake. Journal of Nepal Geological Society, 45, 43-44.
Mugnier, J.-L., A. Gajurel, P. Huyghe, R. Jayangondaperumal, F. Jouanne, and B. Upreti (2013), Structural interpretation of the great earthquakes of the last millennium in the central Himalaya, Earth Science Reviews, 127, 30-47.
Schiffman, C. et al., (2013). Seismic slip deficit in the Kashmir Himalaya from GPS observations,Geophys. Res. Lett.,40,5642-5645, doi:10.1002/2013GL057700.
Srivastava, H. N., Bansal, B. K., Verma , M. (2013), Largest Earthquake in Himalaya: An Appraisal.Geological Society of India, 82, 15-22.
Stevens, V. L.,& J-P. Avouac (2016),Millenary Mw9.0 earthquakes required by geodetic strain in the Himalaya,Geophys. Res. Lett.,43,1118-1123, doi:10.1002/2015GL067336.
