AI might help scientists predict where aftershocks will strike in the future

Neural networks can predict where aftershocks will occur after earthquakes to a higher accuracy than standard techniques, according to a new study published in Nature on Wednesday. After a major earthquake aftershocks can endanger the survivors and those seeking to help them. Now a group of researchers from Harvard University, the University of Connecticut and Google, have tried to figure this out by training neural networks to predict if an aftershock will occur at a particular position. A simple feedforward neural network was trained using data taken from more than 131,000 pairs of main shocks and their aftershocks. The seismic wave patterns are split into grid cells measuring a fixed volume.