[adanto6840]

Right there with you. My wife keeps asking me questions about it and she seems dumbfounded that my relaying of information via research generally ends with "we just don't know how it works".

It seems to me like we've recently (~15-30yrs) had a lot of new technology deployments (and accessibility to the underlying data that's produced) which might considerably help us with gaining an understanding over time. Things like high-resolution, high-precision aerial & satellite radar/lidar/photography and the like.

I tend to think it's just a function of time at this point, but on geological time scales that may still take quite a while I suppose.

[mgsouth]

I'm not optimistic.

1. Hold your hands together, palms open, as if you were praying.

2. Press them together very hard, and at the same time try to slide them past one another.

3. Predict exactly when they will slip, by how much, and how loud the sound will be. To be roughly to scale, it must be with millisecond [0] and millimeter [1] accuracy.

[0] Assuming avg. 100 years between quakes, prediction accurate to a week, avg. 5 seconds before hands slip, then 100 yrs * 52 weeks : 1 week ~ 5,000:1 ~ 5 sec : 1 msec.

[1] A 150 KM fault with a prediction of slip accurate to 0.5 M movement is 300,000:1. For a hand span of 150 mm that would equate to 0.5 um. On the other hand (pun intended), we could compare maximum slippages; assuming an earthquake movement max of 20 M and a hand slippage max of 0.2 M, a real-world resolution of 0.5 M would equate to a hand-slip prediction accurate to 2 mm.