August 6, 2025 • 29 mins
Can animals, A.I. or signals in the sky tell us when the ground is going to tremble? Jorge shakes things up at an earthquake research center and experiences an earthquake in the process.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, welcome to sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm
hoor Chimp. And today we are answering the question can
we predict earthquakes? What are ways humans have tried to
get a heads up on when the ground is gonna shake?
Do animals have a sixth sense about it? Or can
AI see things in the data that we cannot. We're
(00:23):
gonna sit down with two earthquake scientists who are going
to explain that we can actually predict earthquakes, just not
in the way you expect. So hold on to something
because we're taking a dive into the earth shaking science
of earthquakes. Enjoy. Hey everyone, all right, Here are the
(00:47):
top three most destructive earthquakes in recorded history, according to
the US Geological Survey. In two thousand and three, a
magnitude six point five earthquake happened in bomb Iran, which
killed more than forty thousand people and collapsed eighty percent
of all buildings. In nineteen seventy six, a seven point
(01:09):
eight magnitude earthquake struck Tangshan, China, and it's said to
have killed between two hundred and fifty and eight hundred
thousand people, mostly from the collapse of unreinforced brig or
concrete homes. The deadliest earthquake ever is thought to have
happened in fifteen fifty six in Shangxi, China, which killed
(01:30):
about eight hundred and thirty thousand people. It had an
estimated magnitude of eight and reportedly leveled mountains, redirected rivers,
and caused flooding and fires. The strongest earthquake ever recorded
happened off the coast of southern Chile in nineteen sixty
and had a magnitude of nine point five. About sixteen
(01:52):
hundred people were killed, mostly from the giant tsunami to
earthquake cost which had waves reportedly as high as eighty
feet or twenty four meters. Clearly, earthquakes can be major
natural disasters, and it would be great if we could
predict them. So to learn more about the science of
(02:13):
earthquake prediction, I decided to take a field trip to
a major city that is fairly close to a huge
fracture in Earth's crust that has caused several major earthquakes
in the last century. Now, luckily I didn't have to
travel very far because that city is Los Angeles, and
(02:33):
that's where I live, which maybe is not so lucky
here in La. The threat of a big earthquake happening
is something you just kind of learned to live with.
The good news is this is a good place to
live if you're an earthquake scientist. So to learn more
about today's topic, I drove over to the headquarters of
(02:54):
the Southern California seis PIC Network, which is a joint
project between Caltech and the US Geological Survey or USGS. Now,
the first thing I asked him was this, how likely
is it that an earthquake will happen during this interview?
And this is what they said during this interview.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
So this interview is maybe an hour or so, probably
a pretty high likelihood, and in California even probably quite
a high likelihood.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
So at the end we're going to find out if
there was an earthquake during our interview, and spoiler alert,
there was. Okay, let me take a step back. I
went over there to talk to my friend doctor Alan Husker,
the professor at the Seismological Laboratory at Celtech and the
manager of the Southern California Seismic Network, and he introduced
(03:47):
me to doctor Elizabeth Cochrane, a researched geophysicist with the
US Geological Survey. So here's my visit to the hub
of earthquake research in Los Angeles. Hey, I'm walking through Caltech.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Now here we go.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Hello, how are you good to see? Thank you for
letting me crash your meeting? No problem, fun well, thank
you doctor Husker, Thank you Doctor Cochran for joining and
talking with me here today.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Happy to be here.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Can you please tell us would you do what your
every day like?
Speaker 2 (04:24):
So, typically most of my days are spent looking at
seismic wiggles, so trying to understand what happens when an
earthquake occurs and the effects on people and things around us.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
I spend a lot of time managing so budgets, people,
making sure equipment gets out to where it's supposed to
be in the field. And then I'll have a grad
student who's looking at moonquakes.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Oh wow, okay. I started by asking them to give
me a rundown. The way people have tried to predict
earthquakes starting with animals.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
So people think that animals can predict earthquake. It's a
very common. Most people do actually this, well, a lot
does that learn. So some people just think that their
dog or whatever has extra senses that humans don't have,
and so they can sense when something's going to happen
before it happens, because of better vision or hearing or
maybe a sixth sense, that kind of thing. There was
a study a while ago where they had people actually
(05:17):
fell out cards about how their dog was acting and
to mail it in, and what they found was people
observe their pets after an earthquake, and then the amount
of them sending the cards would die off over time.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
So it's kind of like your pet acts odd a lot,
and then if an earthquake happens after that, you attribute
the odd behavior that day, do them knowing an earthquake
is happening, when in fact, you know five days out
of seven they're doing something odd. So there is a
really nice video from one earthquake in Seattle in two
(05:49):
thousand and one that happens to be focused on a
dog that's sleeping on the floor, and.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
The dog gets up, runs.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Away, and then you sort of clearly see that building shaking,
But it turns out that in fact, if you actually
look very closely, the building does start shaking when the
dog gets up the dog noticed the first seismic wave
to arrive, and you know, because they're laying on the floor,
they felt that vibration, were startled by it and got up,
(06:19):
and then the stronger wave arrived. Then that's when people
noticed and started moving around.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah, according to our experts, there's no convincing evidence dogs
can predict earthquakes, but it has to stop people from
trying other animals.
Speaker 5 (06:37):
There was one experiment I heard about that happened in
China where they put electrodes on goats nipples, Oh, if
they could predict earthquakes or whatever.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Barently nothing came out of There was.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Also a different experiment that was done similar thing, where
someone kept tanks of these eels. And because one of
the ideas are some sort of electrical signal as the
rocks are breaking, and you get some electrical signals that
animals that are sensitive to that would be able to
detect it, it didn't work.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Now, to be fair, scientists have tried more serious ways
to predict earthquakes. For example, they've looked to see if
the ground expands or swells right before an earthquake, or
if there's an extra amount of radon gas that comes
up from the ground right before an earthquake hits, but
none of these studies have found anything that can be useful.
(07:29):
Scientists have even looked to the sky for signs that
predict earthquakes, specifically a layer of our atmosphere called the ionosphere.
Speaker 5 (07:40):
So people have looked for other things after really really
big earthquakes, like magnitude eight point five and above. It's
so big that it can sometimes see in a signal
in the ionosphere. So there are all sorts of different
agnotometers and other equipment on satellites around the Earth all
the time. So they tried to look for changes in
the iosphere that what happened beforehand, and it hasn't worked either.
(08:03):
I would say I'm on the skeptical side.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Okay, the I in the sphered doesn't quite work either.
How about using AI?
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, so I think most of the studies that have
suggested that earthquakes might be predictable using sort of deep
learning AI techniques are applied to laboratory data, so those
I think potentially are successful. Boothquakes are quite a bit
different than earthquakes.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
In the lab.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
The ones in the lab are more predictable.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
Because they're more predictable.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
The other thing that I've seen with some of these
AI techniques is they'll say that they get ninety percent
prediction rate, which is great, but ninety percent of the
earthquakes don't matter.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
The ones that matter are the big ones.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
So there was a kind of a prediction conference in
China where if they can predict an earthquake using AI.
So they said that all their predictions were doing really well.
There was a nineteen six point four that actually occurred
during the conference that none of them predicted.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Okay, so apparently dogs can't predict earthquakes, and neither can
goats or eels, or studying the ground or analyzing the
gases emitted underground or measuring the Earth's ionosphere, and not
even AI can predict when the next earthquake is going
to happen. So does this mean it's impossible. When we
(09:22):
come back, we're going to ask our experts why it's
so hard to predict earthquakes and how in some cases
we totally can predict them. Also, we're gonna find out
if there was an earthquake during the interview, So keep
your feet on the ground, stay with us. We'll be
right back and we're back. Okay, we're asking the question
(09:55):
can we predict earthquakes? And I already said the answer
is yes, sort of. But first I wanted to know
why earthquakes are so hard to predict. I mean, we
can predict hurricanes, tsunamis, even solar storms. Why is predicting
the ground right under our feet so tricky? We'll ask
(10:16):
our experts this question, but before that, here's a quick
two minute crash course on what earthquakes are. You might
remember from school science that the Earth is made up
of layers, that the topmost outer shell of the Earth,
the crust, is actually made up of pieces called tectonic plates.
(10:36):
These hard, brittle plates are sort of floating on top
of softer, harder, flowy rock. It goes up and down,
sort of like a lava lamp the size of a planet.
But because these tectonic plates, which is what we're all
standing on, are floating, they tend to move. You can
think of them like giant sheets of ice floating on
(10:59):
a crowded pool. The tectonic plates are all crowded together
and they push on each other as some of them
grow or get sucked back into the Earth due to
the motion of the flowy rock below them. Now, imagine
two big rocky tectonic plates nice to each other, and
they might be pressing against each other, or they might
(11:21):
be going in different directions, in which case it might
be pressing and rubbing against each other. Or one of
them might be trying to slide under the other one,
in which case they might be pressing, rubbing, and lifting
or sinking each other. The point is that you have
two giant bodies of rock and they're pressing against each other,
(11:42):
and all that pressure creates a lot of stress, and
at some point something gives the two rocks can slip
past each other suddenly, either sideways or one under the other,
and that sudden slip is what an earthquake is.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
So an earthquake is a rapids breaking.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Or slip along a fracture on the Earth. So basically,
stresses build up in the earth and they're released really
rapidly during an earthquake.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Now, according to our experts, there are two things that
make earthquakes so hard to predict. The first is that
it all happens miles under the ground.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
So most of the earthquakes happen sort of five to
ten miles deep.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Oh, in subduction zones.
Speaker 5 (12:34):
It's much deeper because it's between where the two plates
are rubbing against each other, deep underneath the earth, so
it might be like fifty miles.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Here's an interesting fact. Earthquakes happen at very specific depth
depending on how the rocks are rubbing against each other.
Earthquakes don't happen deeper because the rock gets hot, which
makes it flow instead of crack, and they don't happen
above about a mile or so down because the rock
there is too loose or crumply. But the ones that
(13:06):
do happen still happen about ten to fifteen miles under
the ground, which makes them hard to study.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Well.
Speaker 5 (13:15):
It's difficult to predict earthquakes is we can't see, like there's.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Rock in the way, so a nice analogy.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
It's quite difficult even to predict what the weather's going
to be like tomorrow, and in that case, there's all
kinds of information about the pressures in the atmosphere, the
temperatures across a whole three D volume, and even then
our weather forecasts are not exact.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
In this case, we're trying to do the same thing,
except buried under miles of rock, where we don't have
any or many measurements of exactly what the temperatures are,
exactly what the pressures are.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
We're kind of blind. Yeah, So the first reason earths
are hard to predict is that they happen ten to
fifteen miles and sometimes fifty miles under ten to fifteen
miles or fifty miles of rock. We don't have a
direct view or even a way to directly measure what's
(14:15):
happening down there. Scientists have to infer what's happening from
what we can see and hear on the surface from
up here and from satellites and kind of guess what's
going on. Now, we can drill holes to see what's happening,
but apparently that's expensive, so we.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
Have drilled into faults.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
For example, there was a hole that was drilled across
the San Andreas fault perpendicularly through the fault, and if
not that deep, so it's down I think it was
two kilometers three kilometers, and from that one hole, we
have so much more information about exactly what those materials
look like, what the stresses are in that one hole, right,
(15:01):
So it's just sampling that one point. But we haven't
trailed a bunch of holes because each one of those
holes cost millions of dollars and we don't have that
much money.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
All right.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
The second reason earthquakes are hard to predict is that
earthquakes happen basically without warning. Remember I said that earthquakes
happen because two rock plates are pressing on each other,
and they're pressing really hard, and at some point something
gives and the plates slip past each other or one
goes under the other. Well, that give is really hard
(15:34):
to know when it's going to happen. It's kind of
like when you're standing on ice and you're pressing down
on the ice. It's really hard to tell when exactly
you're going to slip. Or one analogy or experts like
us is bending a stick until it breaks.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
An even simpler example is it take a stick and
you start to bend it. Can you even exactly when
that stick is going to break before it snaps in half?
And so this is kind of the same thing except
in the earth.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Okay, this is something you can try at home. Rub
a stick or a wood pencil, or better yet, a
single stick of uncooked dried spaghetti and start bending it
as you put more bend into it. You can feel
the stresses building up in the stick or pencil, and
at some point you can't predict it's going to snap.
(16:28):
The same thing happens with these tectonic plates. They press
on each other, the stress builds up, and at some
point they crack and slip, and that's an earthquake. Now,
it's not always totally unpredictable. Sometimes an earthquake will give
you some warning. It'll give you four shocks. You might
have heard of after shocks. Those are smaller earthquakes that
(16:51):
happen after a big one. A four shock is a
smaller earthquake that happens before a big one. Now you
might think, wait, are smaller earthquakes that happened before the
big ones. Doesn't that mean the big ones are predictable.
Not quite. Only some of them give you four shocks,
which means it's still unpredictable.
Speaker 5 (17:15):
About ten percent of the time is a four shock,
but it's most of the time there isn't.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Although we've gotten really good at detecting really small earthquakes,
we still don't necessarily see a lot of four shocks.
In addition, there's nothing different about a foreshock. It doesn't
look different. There's nothing that we can when an earthquake happens.
We can't be like, oh, this is a foreshock.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
You can't take the difference between a four shock to
a big one and just a regular, smaller earthquake, right, Okay,
So that's why earthquakes are hard to predict. They happen
ten to fifteens, sometimes fifty miles under solid rock. It's
a process that happens, usually without warning, just from the
physics of it. Now, again, does that mean it's impossible
(17:58):
to predict an earthquake. Well, it turns out there are
two ways in which we sort of can predict earthquakes.
So when we come back, we're going to learn what
those two ways are and what we can do with
that information. Stay with us, we'll be right back, Welcome back, Okay.
(18:25):
At the beginning of this episode, I asked our experts
what the chances are that an earthquake would hit during
our interview, and we're going to find out at the
end here. But first I promise there were two ways
in which we can predict earthquakes. The first is that
we can cause earthquakes.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
All right, So a fault basically is stuck for most
of the time, right, And the reason it's stuck is
because the forces pushing the fault together are higher than
the forces trying to move it sideways. And so if
you change how much fluids are in the fault, you
change if you put a bunch of water in, you're
(19:09):
effectively reducing that stress that's holding the two sides.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
Of the fault together.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
I see, you're making it slippery, or.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
You're making it easier for the stresses to be larger
than the stress is holding.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
The fault together.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
So it's like if I was pushing down on the
table super hard, it makes it really hard for me
to move my hand sideways.
Speaker 4 (19:27):
But if I.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Put a bunch of water in here, it's pushing back
on my hand and making it so it's then easier
for my hand to move. So one idea is that, well,
if we could trigger an earthquake, uh huh, then we
would actually be able to study in detail what happens.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yes, that's right. Scientists have actually considered drilling holes and
pumping a lot of water into a fault in order
to start an earthquake.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
So this is not just a of idea that we
came up with today.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
Right, There was actually a meeting.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
A few years ago of folks working on earthquake physics
where we actually talked about whether it would be possible
to have an earthquake experiment where we actually would create
an earthquake.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
It just seems like a terrible idea.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Most of the workshop consisted of people talking about where
we would do this because it had to be away
from people, right.
Speaker 5 (20:29):
I think ideally we would want to have like a
ranch of magnitudes, Like we're talking about a three or four,
but if we could create a six or seven, that'd
be great. Like, there's plenty of earthquakes that happened really
far away from more people are and like nobody feels them,
so like it'd be like one of those like.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Well wait, this is just an idea, right, they haven't
actually done it, have they.
Speaker 5 (20:51):
Well, yes, I know, we've started lots of little ones.
Oh yeah, well, I mean the geo thermal regions and stuff.
They're doing it all the time.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
And there was a purposeful experiment a KTB borehole in Germany.
So this was think in the nineties where a deep
borehole was drilled and then they injected fluids and they
triggered a number of earthquakes, small earthquakes. These were kind
of magnitude one to two.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Yeah, okay, So the idea would be to create an
earthquake in order to get more data and understand them better.
But we also talked about starting an earthquake to make
it more predictable.
Speaker 5 (21:31):
Another thing along those lines, if you wanted to say
we can't predict earthquakes, but we could generate one. Let's say,
if we think we could generate a magnitude seven or
eight on the San Andreas. Essentially we would kind of
speed up the clock for when it would happen.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
What our experts are saying here is if we can
induce earthquakes, and it looks like we can, then maybe
for a region like Los Angeles where we know a
big earthquake is coming, the best thing to do is
to get it.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
We're with and so we could, you know, evacuate LA
for a while, pump it as hard as we could,
and see if we can create a giant earthquake on
the San Andreas fault, uh huh, and then we've alleviated
it now for a while, and so people can move
back into La and like feel safer.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
In other words, we could potentially schedule earthquakes. I mean,
it doesn't get more predictable than that. Of course, there
are a few problems with this idea.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
The problem with that is that every large earthquake is
then followed with many, many aftershocks. So and typically the
largest aftershock is about only one magnitude unit less than
the main shock. So if we trigger an eight, we're
then going to have a magnitude seven aftershock. Plus you
know many six's, hundreds of five, you know, thousands of fours,
(22:52):
So how long four years? So in general, aftershock sequences
can go on for decades, and so just alleviating the
stress means that you're then stressing all of the other
faults around it in new ways, and so then those
can have their own earthquakes. And so maybe it's maybe
it's not the best.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah, let's think about that one a little more, all right.
And then the other way in which earthquakes can be
predicted is if you consider the timescale of your prediction.
Remember the analogy of bending a stick and not knowing
when it's going to break, Well, that's not quite true.
(23:33):
You do have some sense of when it's going to snap.
Speaker 5 (23:37):
You have a general idea of on that timescale. It
might not happen instantaneously, but there's a within a few
seconds you can make it happen.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Right, Meaning like if I start bending it stick, I
sort of know within a few stens of seconds when
it's going to snap exactly.
Speaker 5 (23:51):
And so like we're actually really really accurate in predicting earthquakes,
but it's on the Earth timescale, right, So the Earth,
the Earth is you know, billions of years old, and
can say there's going to be an earthquake, you know,
at the San Andreas in the next hundred years, and
you're like, oh, that's really good, right, But no, it's
not useful for humans.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
It is useful to forecasts in that way because that's
how we develop building codes, right. Our buildings last for
hundreds of years sometimes, and so we develop these earthquake
forecasts so that we know how to build the buildings
to withstand the likely events that those buildings will see.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
So we may not be able to predict earthquakes down
to the minute or hour or even month or year,
but through some amazing science by awesome scientists, we can
somehow see beneath miles of rock and have a sense
of when big earthquakes can occur, which maybe is enough.
(24:47):
It can give us guidance about building codes and put
people unnoticed to be prepared. And speaking of being prepared,
let's find out if there was an earthquake during our interview.
All right, well, thank you so much for talking with me. Yeah,
let's go check to see if an earthquake happen.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
So where are you taking?
Speaker 3 (25:09):
Just right? Monitor? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (25:11):
What is it?
Speaker 5 (25:12):
This is data coming from the Southern California sized network.
This is a monitor that we're collecting all the four
hundred stations.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
So we're obviously not showing all of the different centers,
but they're all across Southern California and listening to all
the little events happening on the faults nearby.
Speaker 5 (25:27):
But most of this is just noise. But this line
right here, this flat line, that's an earthquake. Whow So
at about twelve to ten there was an earthquake. It's
probably an aftershock of the ridge gross earthquake.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, or there's a little swarm of events happening right here.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Oh yeah, there too.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Okay, So at twelve ten pm Pacific time, there was
an earthing and we were talking, Yes, how was this earthquake?
Speaker 3 (25:50):
It was been tiny, maybe like a magnitude one or two, and.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
It's telling you, hey, there was something yep, okay. The
last question I asked doctor Husker and doctor Cochrane whether
it would matter if we could predict earthquakes.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
You know, there's also questions of sort of if we
had predictions, what would we do with it? If I
knew half an hour before a magnitude eight on the
San Andreas, what.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
Would we do right?
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Right?
Speaker 2 (26:18):
So you couldn't evacuate Los Angeles in half an hour? Right?
It takes half an hour to get ten miles down
the road on any given day, just two to traffic.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
So I asked them what would you do if you
could predict earthquakes at different timescales? Like what if you
knew an earthquake was likely to happen in the next
ten years, or the next month, or in the next
five minutes.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
I mean ten years would be helpful if we knew
which fault and how big, right, because that would be
a specific scenario that we could plan for. A lot
of our water comes across the San Andreas fault, A
lot of our electricity are you know, so you could
imagine if you had ten years and you knew that
(27:03):
this pipe was the one that was going to be broken,
you would spend that ten years hardening that pipe. You know,
all of those supply lines cross the San Andres.
Speaker 5 (27:14):
A month is still really long, but you could start
to prepare. From the governmental point of view, from a
fireman FEMA, these kind of things like you, okay, let's
get water, large tanks of water everywhere. If it was
of magnitude eight long San Andres, is it going to break?
The I five and I ten those are the major
arteries that leave Los Angeles, so people won't be able
to leave the county. So then like, okay, we know
(27:37):
this is going to happen, Like what can we put
in place to get ready for this that we have
it bridges up quickly and to get people out and
also supplies in.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Warning of five to ten to thirty minutes could be
very useful. So we know that there's a number of buildings,
for example, in Los Angeles that have not been fully
retrofit to with stand earthquakes. These are older buildings, they
were built well before we knew the full earthquake hazard,
and so you could evacuate those buildings.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Oh, I see, it might give you some time, right,
all right, So to recap can we predict earthquakes? Well,
they're unpredictable. They happen deep in the earth where you
can't see them, and they happen because of rocks pressing
on each other and slipping without warning. Despite that, science
can observe the general movement of tectonic plates and build
(28:29):
models that can give us some estimates of when they're
likely to occur. And the more money we put into it,
the shorter the time skill of that prediction will be.
So the next time you talk to your government representative
or official, try to shake them for more earthquake science funding.
Thanks for joining us, See you next time you've been
(28:54):
listening to Science Stuff. Production of iHeartRadio written and produced
by me or Hey, caredited by Rose Seguda, executive producer
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(29:15):
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episode
Hey, welcome to sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm
hoor Chimp. And today we are answering the question can
we predict earthquakes? What are ways humans have tried to
get a heads up on when the ground is gonna shake?
Do animals have a sixth sense about it? Or can
AI see things in the data that we cannot. We're
(00:23):
gonna sit down with two earthquake scientists who are going
to explain that we can actually predict earthquakes, just not
in the way you expect. So hold on to something
because we're taking a dive into the earth shaking science
of earthquakes. Enjoy. Hey everyone, all right, Here are the
(00:47):
top three most destructive earthquakes in recorded history, according to
the US Geological Survey. In two thousand and three, a
magnitude six point five earthquake happened in bomb Iran, which
killed more than forty thousand people and collapsed eighty percent
of all buildings. In nineteen seventy six, a seven point
(01:09):
eight magnitude earthquake struck Tangshan, China, and it's said to
have killed between two hundred and fifty and eight hundred
thousand people, mostly from the collapse of unreinforced brig or
concrete homes. The deadliest earthquake ever is thought to have
happened in fifteen fifty six in Shangxi, China, which killed
(01:30):
about eight hundred and thirty thousand people. It had an
estimated magnitude of eight and reportedly leveled mountains, redirected rivers,
and caused flooding and fires. The strongest earthquake ever recorded
happened off the coast of southern Chile in nineteen sixty
and had a magnitude of nine point five. About sixteen
(01:52):
hundred people were killed, mostly from the giant tsunami to
earthquake cost which had waves reportedly as high as eighty
feet or twenty four meters. Clearly, earthquakes can be major
natural disasters, and it would be great if we could
predict them. So to learn more about the science of
(02:13):
earthquake prediction, I decided to take a field trip to
a major city that is fairly close to a huge
fracture in Earth's crust that has caused several major earthquakes
in the last century. Now, luckily I didn't have to
travel very far because that city is Los Angeles, and
(02:33):
that's where I live, which maybe is not so lucky
here in La. The threat of a big earthquake happening
is something you just kind of learned to live with.
The good news is this is a good place to
live if you're an earthquake scientist. So to learn more
about today's topic, I drove over to the headquarters of
(02:54):
the Southern California seis PIC Network, which is a joint
project between Caltech and the US Geological Survey or USGS. Now,
the first thing I asked him was this, how likely
is it that an earthquake will happen during this interview?
And this is what they said during this interview.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
So this interview is maybe an hour or so, probably
a pretty high likelihood, and in California even probably quite
a high likelihood.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
So at the end we're going to find out if
there was an earthquake during our interview, and spoiler alert,
there was. Okay, let me take a step back. I
went over there to talk to my friend doctor Alan Husker,
the professor at the Seismological Laboratory at Celtech and the
manager of the Southern California Seismic Network, and he introduced
(03:47):
me to doctor Elizabeth Cochrane, a researched geophysicist with the
US Geological Survey. So here's my visit to the hub
of earthquake research in Los Angeles. Hey, I'm walking through Caltech.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Now here we go.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Hello, how are you good to see? Thank you for
letting me crash your meeting? No problem, fun well, thank
you doctor Husker, Thank you Doctor Cochran for joining and
talking with me here today.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Happy to be here.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Can you please tell us would you do what your
every day like?
Speaker 2 (04:24):
So, typically most of my days are spent looking at
seismic wiggles, so trying to understand what happens when an
earthquake occurs and the effects on people and things around us.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
I spend a lot of time managing so budgets, people,
making sure equipment gets out to where it's supposed to
be in the field. And then I'll have a grad
student who's looking at moonquakes.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Oh wow, okay. I started by asking them to give
me a rundown. The way people have tried to predict
earthquakes starting with animals.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
So people think that animals can predict earthquake. It's a
very common. Most people do actually this, well, a lot
does that learn. So some people just think that their
dog or whatever has extra senses that humans don't have,
and so they can sense when something's going to happen
before it happens, because of better vision or hearing or
maybe a sixth sense, that kind of thing. There was
a study a while ago where they had people actually
(05:17):
fell out cards about how their dog was acting and
to mail it in, and what they found was people
observe their pets after an earthquake, and then the amount
of them sending the cards would die off over time.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
So it's kind of like your pet acts odd a lot,
and then if an earthquake happens after that, you attribute
the odd behavior that day, do them knowing an earthquake
is happening, when in fact, you know five days out
of seven they're doing something odd. So there is a
really nice video from one earthquake in Seattle in two
(05:49):
thousand and one that happens to be focused on a
dog that's sleeping on the floor, and.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
The dog gets up, runs.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Away, and then you sort of clearly see that building shaking,
But it turns out that in fact, if you actually
look very closely, the building does start shaking when the
dog gets up the dog noticed the first seismic wave
to arrive, and you know, because they're laying on the floor,
they felt that vibration, were startled by it and got up,
(06:19):
and then the stronger wave arrived. Then that's when people
noticed and started moving around.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah, according to our experts, there's no convincing evidence dogs
can predict earthquakes, but it has to stop people from
trying other animals.
Speaker 5 (06:37):
There was one experiment I heard about that happened in
China where they put electrodes on goats nipples, Oh, if
they could predict earthquakes or whatever.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Barently nothing came out of There was.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Also a different experiment that was done similar thing, where
someone kept tanks of these eels. And because one of
the ideas are some sort of electrical signal as the
rocks are breaking, and you get some electrical signals that
animals that are sensitive to that would be able to
detect it, it didn't work.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Now, to be fair, scientists have tried more serious ways
to predict earthquakes. For example, they've looked to see if
the ground expands or swells right before an earthquake, or
if there's an extra amount of radon gas that comes
up from the ground right before an earthquake hits, but
none of these studies have found anything that can be useful.
(07:29):
Scientists have even looked to the sky for signs that
predict earthquakes, specifically a layer of our atmosphere called the ionosphere.
Speaker 5 (07:40):
So people have looked for other things after really really
big earthquakes, like magnitude eight point five and above. It's
so big that it can sometimes see in a signal
in the ionosphere. So there are all sorts of different
agnotometers and other equipment on satellites around the Earth all
the time. So they tried to look for changes in
the iosphere that what happened beforehand, and it hasn't worked either.
(08:03):
I would say I'm on the skeptical side.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Okay, the I in the sphered doesn't quite work either.
How about using AI?
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, so I think most of the studies that have
suggested that earthquakes might be predictable using sort of deep
learning AI techniques are applied to laboratory data, so those
I think potentially are successful. Boothquakes are quite a bit
different than earthquakes.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
In the lab.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
The ones in the lab are more predictable.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
Because they're more predictable.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
The other thing that I've seen with some of these
AI techniques is they'll say that they get ninety percent
prediction rate, which is great, but ninety percent of the
earthquakes don't matter.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
The ones that matter are the big ones.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
So there was a kind of a prediction conference in
China where if they can predict an earthquake using AI.
So they said that all their predictions were doing really well.
There was a nineteen six point four that actually occurred
during the conference that none of them predicted.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Okay, so apparently dogs can't predict earthquakes, and neither can
goats or eels, or studying the ground or analyzing the
gases emitted underground or measuring the Earth's ionosphere, and not
even AI can predict when the next earthquake is going
to happen. So does this mean it's impossible. When we
(09:22):
come back, we're going to ask our experts why it's
so hard to predict earthquakes and how in some cases
we totally can predict them. Also, we're gonna find out
if there was an earthquake during the interview, So keep
your feet on the ground, stay with us. We'll be
right back and we're back. Okay, we're asking the question
(09:55):
can we predict earthquakes? And I already said the answer
is yes, sort of. But first I wanted to know
why earthquakes are so hard to predict. I mean, we
can predict hurricanes, tsunamis, even solar storms. Why is predicting
the ground right under our feet so tricky? We'll ask
(10:16):
our experts this question, but before that, here's a quick
two minute crash course on what earthquakes are. You might
remember from school science that the Earth is made up
of layers, that the topmost outer shell of the Earth,
the crust, is actually made up of pieces called tectonic plates.
(10:36):
These hard, brittle plates are sort of floating on top
of softer, harder, flowy rock. It goes up and down,
sort of like a lava lamp the size of a planet.
But because these tectonic plates, which is what we're all
standing on, are floating, they tend to move. You can
think of them like giant sheets of ice floating on
(10:59):
a crowded pool. The tectonic plates are all crowded together
and they push on each other as some of them
grow or get sucked back into the Earth due to
the motion of the flowy rock below them. Now, imagine
two big rocky tectonic plates nice to each other, and
they might be pressing against each other, or they might
(11:21):
be going in different directions, in which case it might
be pressing and rubbing against each other. Or one of
them might be trying to slide under the other one,
in which case they might be pressing, rubbing, and lifting
or sinking each other. The point is that you have
two giant bodies of rock and they're pressing against each other,
(11:42):
and all that pressure creates a lot of stress, and
at some point something gives the two rocks can slip
past each other suddenly, either sideways or one under the other,
and that sudden slip is what an earthquake is.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
So an earthquake is a rapids breaking.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Or slip along a fracture on the Earth. So basically,
stresses build up in the earth and they're released really
rapidly during an earthquake.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Now, according to our experts, there are two things that
make earthquakes so hard to predict. The first is that
it all happens miles under the ground.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
So most of the earthquakes happen sort of five to
ten miles deep.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Oh, in subduction zones.
Speaker 5 (12:34):
It's much deeper because it's between where the two plates
are rubbing against each other, deep underneath the earth, so
it might be like fifty miles.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Here's an interesting fact. Earthquakes happen at very specific depth
depending on how the rocks are rubbing against each other.
Earthquakes don't happen deeper because the rock gets hot, which
makes it flow instead of crack, and they don't happen
above about a mile or so down because the rock
there is too loose or crumply. But the ones that
(13:06):
do happen still happen about ten to fifteen miles under
the ground, which makes them hard to study.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Well.
Speaker 5 (13:15):
It's difficult to predict earthquakes is we can't see, like there's.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Rock in the way, so a nice analogy.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
It's quite difficult even to predict what the weather's going
to be like tomorrow, and in that case, there's all
kinds of information about the pressures in the atmosphere, the
temperatures across a whole three D volume, and even then
our weather forecasts are not exact.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
In this case, we're trying to do the same thing,
except buried under miles of rock, where we don't have
any or many measurements of exactly what the temperatures are,
exactly what the pressures are.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
We're kind of blind. Yeah, So the first reason earths
are hard to predict is that they happen ten to
fifteen miles and sometimes fifty miles under ten to fifteen
miles or fifty miles of rock. We don't have a
direct view or even a way to directly measure what's
(14:15):
happening down there. Scientists have to infer what's happening from
what we can see and hear on the surface from
up here and from satellites and kind of guess what's
going on. Now, we can drill holes to see what's happening,
but apparently that's expensive, so we.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
Have drilled into faults.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
For example, there was a hole that was drilled across
the San Andreas fault perpendicularly through the fault, and if
not that deep, so it's down I think it was
two kilometers three kilometers, and from that one hole, we
have so much more information about exactly what those materials
look like, what the stresses are in that one hole, right,
(15:01):
So it's just sampling that one point. But we haven't
trailed a bunch of holes because each one of those
holes cost millions of dollars and we don't have that
much money.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
All right.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
The second reason earthquakes are hard to predict is that
earthquakes happen basically without warning. Remember I said that earthquakes
happen because two rock plates are pressing on each other,
and they're pressing really hard, and at some point something
gives and the plates slip past each other or one
goes under the other. Well, that give is really hard
(15:34):
to know when it's going to happen. It's kind of
like when you're standing on ice and you're pressing down
on the ice. It's really hard to tell when exactly
you're going to slip. Or one analogy or experts like
us is bending a stick until it breaks.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
An even simpler example is it take a stick and
you start to bend it. Can you even exactly when
that stick is going to break before it snaps in half?
And so this is kind of the same thing except
in the earth.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Okay, this is something you can try at home. Rub
a stick or a wood pencil, or better yet, a
single stick of uncooked dried spaghetti and start bending it
as you put more bend into it. You can feel
the stresses building up in the stick or pencil, and
at some point you can't predict it's going to snap.
(16:28):
The same thing happens with these tectonic plates. They press
on each other, the stress builds up, and at some
point they crack and slip, and that's an earthquake. Now,
it's not always totally unpredictable. Sometimes an earthquake will give
you some warning. It'll give you four shocks. You might
have heard of after shocks. Those are smaller earthquakes that
(16:51):
happen after a big one. A four shock is a
smaller earthquake that happens before a big one. Now you
might think, wait, are smaller earthquakes that happened before the
big ones. Doesn't that mean the big ones are predictable.
Not quite. Only some of them give you four shocks,
which means it's still unpredictable.
Speaker 5 (17:15):
About ten percent of the time is a four shock,
but it's most of the time there isn't.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Although we've gotten really good at detecting really small earthquakes,
we still don't necessarily see a lot of four shocks.
In addition, there's nothing different about a foreshock. It doesn't
look different. There's nothing that we can when an earthquake happens.
We can't be like, oh, this is a foreshock.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
You can't take the difference between a four shock to
a big one and just a regular, smaller earthquake, right, Okay,
So that's why earthquakes are hard to predict. They happen
ten to fifteens, sometimes fifty miles under solid rock. It's
a process that happens, usually without warning, just from the
physics of it. Now, again, does that mean it's impossible
(17:58):
to predict an earthquake. Well, it turns out there are
two ways in which we sort of can predict earthquakes.
So when we come back, we're going to learn what
those two ways are and what we can do with
that information. Stay with us, we'll be right back, Welcome back, Okay.
(18:25):
At the beginning of this episode, I asked our experts
what the chances are that an earthquake would hit during
our interview, and we're going to find out at the
end here. But first I promise there were two ways
in which we can predict earthquakes. The first is that
we can cause earthquakes.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
All right, So a fault basically is stuck for most
of the time, right, And the reason it's stuck is
because the forces pushing the fault together are higher than
the forces trying to move it sideways. And so if
you change how much fluids are in the fault, you
change if you put a bunch of water in, you're
(19:09):
effectively reducing that stress that's holding the two sides.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
Of the fault together.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
I see, you're making it slippery, or.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
You're making it easier for the stresses to be larger
than the stress is holding.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
The fault together.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
So it's like if I was pushing down on the
table super hard, it makes it really hard for me
to move my hand sideways.
Speaker 4 (19:27):
But if I.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Put a bunch of water in here, it's pushing back
on my hand and making it so it's then easier
for my hand to move. So one idea is that, well,
if we could trigger an earthquake, uh huh, then we
would actually be able to study in detail what happens.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yes, that's right. Scientists have actually considered drilling holes and
pumping a lot of water into a fault in order
to start an earthquake.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
So this is not just a of idea that we
came up with today.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
Right, There was actually a meeting.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
A few years ago of folks working on earthquake physics
where we actually talked about whether it would be possible
to have an earthquake experiment where we actually would create
an earthquake.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
It just seems like a terrible idea.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Most of the workshop consisted of people talking about where
we would do this because it had to be away
from people, right.
Speaker 5 (20:29):
I think ideally we would want to have like a
ranch of magnitudes, Like we're talking about a three or four,
but if we could create a six or seven, that'd
be great. Like, there's plenty of earthquakes that happened really
far away from more people are and like nobody feels them,
so like it'd be like one of those like.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Well wait, this is just an idea, right, they haven't
actually done it, have they.
Speaker 5 (20:51):
Well, yes, I know, we've started lots of little ones.
Oh yeah, well, I mean the geo thermal regions and stuff.
They're doing it all the time.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
And there was a purposeful experiment a KTB borehole in Germany.
So this was think in the nineties where a deep
borehole was drilled and then they injected fluids and they
triggered a number of earthquakes, small earthquakes. These were kind
of magnitude one to two.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Yeah, okay, So the idea would be to create an
earthquake in order to get more data and understand them better.
But we also talked about starting an earthquake to make
it more predictable.
Speaker 5 (21:31):
Another thing along those lines, if you wanted to say
we can't predict earthquakes, but we could generate one. Let's say,
if we think we could generate a magnitude seven or
eight on the San Andreas. Essentially we would kind of
speed up the clock for when it would happen.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
What our experts are saying here is if we can
induce earthquakes, and it looks like we can, then maybe
for a region like Los Angeles where we know a
big earthquake is coming, the best thing to do is
to get it.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
We're with and so we could, you know, evacuate LA
for a while, pump it as hard as we could,
and see if we can create a giant earthquake on
the San Andreas fault, uh huh, and then we've alleviated
it now for a while, and so people can move
back into La and like feel safer.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
In other words, we could potentially schedule earthquakes. I mean,
it doesn't get more predictable than that. Of course, there
are a few problems with this idea.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
The problem with that is that every large earthquake is
then followed with many, many aftershocks. So and typically the
largest aftershock is about only one magnitude unit less than
the main shock. So if we trigger an eight, we're
then going to have a magnitude seven aftershock. Plus you
know many six's, hundreds of five, you know, thousands of fours,
(22:52):
So how long four years? So in general, aftershock sequences
can go on for decades, and so just alleviating the
stress means that you're then stressing all of the other
faults around it in new ways, and so then those
can have their own earthquakes. And so maybe it's maybe
it's not the best.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah, let's think about that one a little more, all right.
And then the other way in which earthquakes can be
predicted is if you consider the timescale of your prediction.
Remember the analogy of bending a stick and not knowing
when it's going to break, Well, that's not quite true.
(23:33):
You do have some sense of when it's going to snap.
Speaker 5 (23:37):
You have a general idea of on that timescale. It
might not happen instantaneously, but there's a within a few
seconds you can make it happen.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Right, Meaning like if I start bending it stick, I
sort of know within a few stens of seconds when
it's going to snap exactly.
Speaker 5 (23:51):
And so like we're actually really really accurate in predicting earthquakes,
but it's on the Earth timescale, right, So the Earth,
the Earth is you know, billions of years old, and
can say there's going to be an earthquake, you know,
at the San Andreas in the next hundred years, and
you're like, oh, that's really good, right, But no, it's
not useful for humans.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
It is useful to forecasts in that way because that's
how we develop building codes, right. Our buildings last for
hundreds of years sometimes, and so we develop these earthquake
forecasts so that we know how to build the buildings
to withstand the likely events that those buildings will see.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
So we may not be able to predict earthquakes down
to the minute or hour or even month or year,
but through some amazing science by awesome scientists, we can
somehow see beneath miles of rock and have a sense
of when big earthquakes can occur, which maybe is enough.
(24:47):
It can give us guidance about building codes and put
people unnoticed to be prepared. And speaking of being prepared,
let's find out if there was an earthquake during our interview.
All right, well, thank you so much for talking with me. Yeah,
let's go check to see if an earthquake happen.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
So where are you taking?
Speaker 3 (25:09):
Just right? Monitor? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (25:11):
What is it?
Speaker 5 (25:12):
This is data coming from the Southern California sized network.
This is a monitor that we're collecting all the four
hundred stations.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
So we're obviously not showing all of the different centers,
but they're all across Southern California and listening to all
the little events happening on the faults nearby.
Speaker 5 (25:27):
But most of this is just noise. But this line
right here, this flat line, that's an earthquake. Whow So
at about twelve to ten there was an earthquake. It's
probably an aftershock of the ridge gross earthquake.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, or there's a little swarm of events happening right here.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Oh yeah, there too.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Okay, So at twelve ten pm Pacific time, there was
an earthing and we were talking, Yes, how was this earthquake?
Speaker 3 (25:50):
It was been tiny, maybe like a magnitude one or two, and.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
It's telling you, hey, there was something yep, okay. The
last question I asked doctor Husker and doctor Cochrane whether
it would matter if we could predict earthquakes.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
You know, there's also questions of sort of if we
had predictions, what would we do with it? If I
knew half an hour before a magnitude eight on the
San Andreas, what.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
Would we do right?
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Right?
Speaker 2 (26:18):
So you couldn't evacuate Los Angeles in half an hour? Right?
It takes half an hour to get ten miles down
the road on any given day, just two to traffic.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
So I asked them what would you do if you
could predict earthquakes at different timescales? Like what if you
knew an earthquake was likely to happen in the next
ten years, or the next month, or in the next
five minutes.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
I mean ten years would be helpful if we knew
which fault and how big, right, because that would be
a specific scenario that we could plan for. A lot
of our water comes across the San Andreas fault, A
lot of our electricity are you know, so you could
imagine if you had ten years and you knew that
(27:03):
this pipe was the one that was going to be broken,
you would spend that ten years hardening that pipe. You know,
all of those supply lines cross the San Andres.
Speaker 5 (27:14):
A month is still really long, but you could start
to prepare. From the governmental point of view, from a
fireman FEMA, these kind of things like you, okay, let's
get water, large tanks of water everywhere. If it was
of magnitude eight long San Andres, is it going to break?
The I five and I ten those are the major
arteries that leave Los Angeles, so people won't be able
to leave the county. So then like, okay, we know
(27:37):
this is going to happen, Like what can we put
in place to get ready for this that we have
it bridges up quickly and to get people out and
also supplies in.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Warning of five to ten to thirty minutes could be
very useful. So we know that there's a number of buildings,
for example, in Los Angeles that have not been fully
retrofit to with stand earthquakes. These are older buildings, they
were built well before we knew the full earthquake hazard,
and so you could evacuate those buildings.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Oh, I see, it might give you some time, right,
all right, So to recap can we predict earthquakes? Well,
they're unpredictable. They happen deep in the earth where you
can't see them, and they happen because of rocks pressing
on each other and slipping without warning. Despite that, science
can observe the general movement of tectonic plates and build
(28:29):
models that can give us some estimates of when they're
likely to occur. And the more money we put into it,
the shorter the time skill of that prediction will be.
So the next time you talk to your government representative
or official, try to shake them for more earthquake science funding.
Thanks for joining us, See you next time you've been
(28:54):
listening to Science Stuff. Production of iHeartRadio written and produced
by me or Hey, caredited by Rose Seguda, executive producer
Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Pegram, and
you can follow me on social media. Just search for
PhD Comics and the name of your favorite platform. Be
sure to subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app,
(29:15):
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and please
tell your friends we'll be back next Wednesday with another
episode
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
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