QuakeFinder is a private company located in Palo Alto, CA conducting pioneering research in the area of earthquake forecasting. Conceived in 2000 as an education outreach concept by the successful aerospace engineering services company Stellar Solutions, QuakeFinder’s goal firmly developed into a broader vision—to save lives by conducting research with the aim to make global forecasts of seismic activity a reality in order to provide communities, within the next decade, with early warnings of potentially destructive earthquakes.
QuakeFinder’s activities include:
These activities aim to provide leverage to promising research results that show unusual electromagnetic signatures as precursors to major earthquakes in different parts of the world, such as the findings by Stanford University showing ULF signal activity two weeks before the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and other similar research. Cooperation and partnerships with NASA, UC Berkeley, Stanford and The Weather Channel allow QuakeFinder to create a synergy of coordinated efforts. An example of the benefits of this collaborative approach is the integration of ELF data with other space and ground earthquake research networks to optimize cooperative data analysis and accelerate earthquake forecasting research.
Although many US government seismologists have expressed pessimism about ever being able to predict earthquakes, the international research has taken a different strategy and are actively monitoring a number of pre-earthquake electromagnetic signals. Some dedicated partners such as NASA, UC Berkeley, Purdue and Stanford are collaborating by sharing data and actively monitoring electromagnetic phenomena associated with earthquake preparation processes. These efforts are in their infancy, but for the first time, indicate that Electromagnetic disturbances may yield a promising path toward earthquake forecasting.
