Machine learning could also help us create more data to study. By identifying perhaps as many as 10 times more earthquakes in seismic data than we are aware of, Beroza, Mousavi, and Margarita Segou, a researcher at the British Geological Survey, determined that machine learning is useful for creating more robust databases of earthquakes that have occurred; they published their findings in a 2021 paper for Nature Communications. These improved data sets can help us—and machines—understand earthquakes better.
“You know, there’s tremendous skepticism in our community, with good reason,” Johnson says. “But I think this is allowing us to see and analyze data and realize what those data contain in ways we never could have imagined.”
While some researchers are relying on the most current technology, others are looking back at history to formulate some pretty radical studies based on animals. One of the shirts I collected over 10 years of attending geophysics conferences features the namazu, a giant mythical catfish that in Japan was believed to generate earthquakes by swimming beneath Earth’s crust.
