A Continuous Crustal Stress Monitoring Method for Earthquake Prediction

We herein report a novel technique to continuously monitor the crustal stress change for earthquake prediction. On the basis of the relationship between permeability and stress, we designed a “squared-wave water flow” method, which allowed us to measure an experimental output that solely depends on the crustal stress. A carefully designed experimental set-up has been built where we employed several key techniques so that sufficient precision and sensitivity in the measurement have been achieved. In particular, our preliminary experimental results showed that the instrumental sensitivity reached the level of the solid-earth tide. Moreover, compared with other methods, the main advantage of our approach is the superb anti-interference property. Our results showed that neither environmental variables (rainfall, barometric pressure variation, etc.) nor the small amount of nearby water loss affected our experimental measurement. Therefore, it is envisaged that, by building a network of such set-ups, we may be able to retrieve a regional dynamic stress map, and build an earthquake prediction model accordingly.