Over the past decade, the world has experienced some very big earthquakes in China, Chile, Japan and one of the deadliest ever, the Indian Ocean quake and tsunami of 2004. All of this has scientists trying to get better at predicting quakes.

And NPR's Christopher Joyce reports that they are making some progress.

CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: There's a joke among scientists: prediction is difficult, especially about the future. For Ross Stein, it wasn't a joke after the Indian Ocean quake and tsunami. That killed some 275,000 people.

ROSS STEIN: I just felt almost a sense of shame that this tragedy could have been so immense in a world where we have so much intense research effort.

JOYCE: Stein is a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey. He says quake experts have learned a couple of important things over the last few years. The first is about aftershocks that follow a big earthquake. They're not just a sort of quake death spasm. They can actually make more quakes more likely. Take, for example, two recent quakes, one off the coast of Chile and the Japanese Tohoku quake.

STEIN: Even though these mega quakes in 2010 and 2011 were enormously damaging, in airline parlance they were still near-misses.

JOYCE: They hit about 300 miles from Santiago and Tokyo, and that's lucky. You'd think they'd dodged a bullet. But Stein says new research indicates they may be in more danger now. That's because those quakes and aftershocks actually exported stress to other faults, faults close to Santiago and Tokyo. And that's bad, more stress could make them slip and cause another big quake near those cities.

STEIN: So, in the greater Tokyo area, the hazard is probably two to three times higher than it was before the 2011 main shock.

JOYCE: Now, there some good news here. Stein says the pattern of a mega-quake's aftershocks should give scientists a way to roughly calculate the chance of another quake, in fact, with more certainty than they can predict an Initial quake. So that's one lesson learned. Here's another.

In Japan, it was a tectonic plate boundary out in the ocean that caused the quake and tsunami. Scientists had been watching it. They knew it could go sometime. But they figured if it did, only one section at a time would rupture kind of like one button on a shirt popping. They were wrong. It unzipped.

NED FIELD: What happened in Tohoku is the whole thing ruptured and created a much larger earthquake than had previously been anticipated.

JOYCE: Geophysicist Ned Field says geoscientists now view some fault systems as closely tied together; when one part ruptures, others follow.

FIELD: We're recognizing that rather than having these isolated magnitude sevenish type earthquakes, on occasion these faults can link up into much larger earthquakes.

JOYCE: So, in effect, what scientists are learning is that a big quake can be contagious - either right away, or over a period of months or years. This has implications. Field, who's also with the Geological Survey, is rewriting the earthquake hazard plan for California. The new version will incorporate the idea that if a quake hits nearby, chances of another one go up.

FIELD: That may be a basis for going out and getting more earthquake insurance for the next year.

JOYCE: Or a good reason for doing a little home reinforcement.


STEIN: We owe them our best effort at depicting where the hazard is high so people can be aware of it and make decisions.

JOYCE: Christopher Joyce, NPR News.


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