I was listening to an interview of a woman in Japan

[Lucinda]

speaking about the big earthquake. She mentioned the crows getting very noisy not long before the shaking started. Mother nature's early warning system at work.

[SheilaT]

1. Sometimes there are those kinds of

advance warnings, sometimes not.

The Chinese got very interested in the advance animal warnings -- which even when they occur are at best a few minutes, maybe a couple of hours before the quake -- several decades ago. They were actually having a certain amount of success, when with absolutely no warning of any kind a 7.8 earthquake struck on July 28, 1976 in Tangshan, China, killing at least a quarter of a million people.

It seems as though the best that can be done for earthquake prediction is to state statistical likelihood of one. It's why we all know "The Big One" has yet to occur in California. Almost no where on the planet can be considered totally safe from the possibility of an earthquake, although they obviously happen more often in certain places.

The only time I was in an earthquake (actually an aftershock of the Northridge Quake in 1994) I slept through it, but I've always been obsessively fascinated by them. The very best book out there on the topic is, in my opinion, On Shaky Ground by John Nance. It came out in 1979, so obviously it doesn't have anything more recent than that, but it covers the Good Friday earthquake in Alaska (8.something, and the shaking lasted a full five minutes) and the New Madrid Quakes (December 1811-February 1812) are covered in wonderful detail. The latter series of quakes were so powerful they made church bells ring as far away as Washington, D.C. Great book.