I wonder if the professionals sit around and discuss these patterns? I mean, they must, right? Surely there's somebody in a position of authority or at least influence who is connecting the dots.

You would think so but jeez, it makes you wonder what the hell is going on there...

In my lifetime I've seen the invention of computers, the internet, seen that huge black and white tv turn to living colour and fit into my pocket, I've seen mind-boggling breakthroughs in space exploration, medicine, weather modelling, etc, etc...

But meanwhile, what have the earthquake academic community and their fifty collective years of public money come up with in the same period of time?

Nothing.

The ability to predict earthquakes now is exactly where it was fifty years ago and there is zero official public guidance regarding the most catastrophic human-impacting natural disasters on the planet

What's up with that?

Exhibit A:

24 hours before the 6.4M earthquake hit Hualien, CWB, under pressure from a jittery public who'd experienced two days of an unprecedented amount of escalating fore-shocks, issued a statement that everything was 'normal', that the peak had been reached ( 5.8M - though US rated 6.1), and there'd be some aftershocks, but relax and carry on

After the 6.4 that caused widespread damage and killed 17 people and injured hundreds CWB issues statement saying 'Whoops! We now think there could be an even bigger earthquake in the Hualien area to follow - actually we don't really know and we're just saying that to cover our arses - but good luck!"

The take-away is there's something radically wrong with the whole academic industry of seismology

Just trying to research it diy style, you'd be amazed how few papers are out there on fore-shocks! Quite common actually in big earthquakes and would seem like a very promising avenue of enquiry if you're in the business of forecasting the big ones

But almost nothing on the subject - instead there are endless regurgitations of studies on big earthquakes, which fault lines they occurred on, how long since the last time that fault failed, how much destruction they caused and lots and lots of stuff on all the aftershocks

Just this apparently is enough to get your grant renewed for another year - though none of it, unfortunately, advances the dial whatsoever on giving the pubic any earthquake fore-warning