Japan earthquake searches continue into night, with people missing in mall and collapsed factory

Shaimaa Khalil and Flora Drury
BBC News

Not according to Robert Geller, professor emeritus of seismology at the University of Tokyo.

When authorities issued a megaquake warning in 2024, after a 7.1 quake struck southern Japan, Prof Geller told the BBC that the warning had “almost nothing to do with science”.

The advisory was “not a useful piece of information”, he said.

This, he argued, is because while earthquakes are known to be a “clustered phenomenon”, it is “not possible to tell in advance whether a quake is a foreshock or an aftershock”.

Indeed, only about 5% of earthquakes are “foreshocks”, geologists Kyle Bradley and Judith