Harvard research team discovered that earthquake activities are actually organized chaos rather than pure chaotic event as scientists had previously believed.
The team began by examining patterns of seismic signals — transient waveforms that radiate from the first rupture in a fault, a thin seam of crushed rock separating two blocks of the earth’s crust. An earthquake occurs when the blocks break free. Scientists read these waves using an underground instrument called a seismometer that translates motions into a graph called a seismogram. “Seismograms give us information about what happened on the fault at the place where the earthquake occurred,” said Denolle.Harvard Gazette