While I was doing some personal education on the science of earthquakes I came across this page at the USGS for kids and I felt a little disappointed for 2 reasons. First under the section “Can scientists predict earthquakes?” they respond with

No, and it is unlikely they will ever be able to predict them. Scientists have tried many different ways of predicting earthquakes, but none have been successful. On any particular fault, scientists know there will be another earthquake sometime in the future, but they have no way of telling when it will happen.

This feels too absolute to me, I challenge that statement and I believe that it’s only a matter of time before we can, not if we can. It is a very complicated topic, we as a species will some day come to understand it well enough to predict it. That may be several generations from now but to say it’s unlikely we ever will, seems unrealistic to me.

The second disappointment came when I was going to write them about the wording on the page and saw that they just copied the article from another publication. The article was well written and good material for kids but I feel a bit gipped that the USGS didn’t write their own material. This is probably common practice but it still feels like diet coke.