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News / Brèves

Tsunami Victims and Damages Can Be Avoided, Says Italian Scientist to EIR

1 April 2011

(EIRNS) - Prof. Pier Francesco Biagi, Italy’s leading researcher on earthquake precursors, welcomed Lyndon LaRouche’s proposal to restart the U.S. National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program, and to include NASA into it. In a discussion with EIR today, he said that the original flaw must be corrected, of establishing a deadline for results. You cannot, say, as it was done for the USNEHRP, that "in ten years we will analyze results and, on the basis of that, we will decide whether the funding should continue." It must be an open-ended program: It can be that in ten years, not enough results are collected, because there is a low activity; and it can be that enough results are achieved in three years, because of high activity.

Professor Biagi stressed throughout the discussion that it is possible to detect the outbreak of earthquakes in advance, with an up to ten days’ lead time—contrary to the clique within the U.S. Geological Survey, who say the opposite.

If he were the head of NASA, and could decide on programs to finance for earthquake precursors, Biagi said, he would immediately start a "very selective program of nano-satellites." The first nano-satellite would cost 1 million euros, and each successive one 600 000 euros. This is in reality peanuts, but there is no government financing for that. The Italians tried a couple of years ago to promote a European program, but they failed.

Governments prefer to finance other programs, such as "the coupling of polar bears," he said, wryly.

There is only one nation that sent a satellite in orbit specifically for earthquake research, and that was France, with its Demeter satellite. Its data were "very interesting," Biagi pointed out.

We are definitely in a phase of high-level earthquake activity, Biagi said. It is evident that seismic cicles coincide with the sun’s activity.

Precursor research is currently done in very few countries, and these are, in order of the programs’ importance: Japan, Italy, Greece, and Russia. Those scientific groups meet regularly and coordinate their activity. Biagi works closely with Hayakawa and Molchanov, among others. The problem is that none of those programs are government-financed, and scientists must organize private financing, sometimes in quite ingenious ways.

The Italians are collecting and evaluating data detected by a network of transmitters throughout the world, which are otherwise used for other purposes. They collect data on electromagnetic activity in advance of earthquakes. They are able to forecast with ten days in advance, with a probability higher than 80%, that a major earthquake will hit a certain region. Of course, the locality cannot be indicated with absolute precision, but in about a 100 km radius.