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Credit: Heather Whipps
According to a rumor that has circulated on the Internet for months, Raffaele Bendandi, an Italian pseudoscientist who died in 1979, predicted before his death that a massive earthquake will strike Rome on Wednesday (May 11). No one is sure that he actually made such a prediction — his chief biographer is unaware of such a prediction — but regardless, in response, Romans are taking heed and fleeing their city by the thousands.
Working in this rumor's favor is the fact that Bendandi, who also dabbled in astronomy, correctly guessed the approximate date of an earthquake in the Adriatic region in 1923, a feat for which he was later knighted. Will his alleged posthumous prediction come to pass too?
Geophysicists say no — almost certainly not. Not only are earthquakes far too chaotic to be predicted decades ahead of time, they aren't even predictable on the scales of days.
"To predict an earthquake, you need a precursory signal of some kind, and we've yet to find anything reliable," said Tom Parsons, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). "A lot of things have been tried in terms of looking for electrical signals or gas release, and paying attention to animal behavior, but none of these have turned out to be reliable."
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