芦山地震再次让地震预报成了科学家与大众共同关心的热点，特摘出下面几点有关地震预报的认识供大家思考。

1.      Earthquakes occur at sites where they have previously occurred. Earthquakes that occurred hundreds or thousands of years ago leave scars in the crust (i.e.,volumes of heterogeneity that demonstrate the size of their faults). These volumes display a significantly different rheology compared with their surroundings. Rheology and heterogeneity within these volumes are significantly variable in time and space.

2.      Fluids migrating upward into the Earth’s cold and brittle crust (where earthquakes occur) play asignificant role in modifying crustal conditions in ways that favor rupture. This helps to determine where the next earthquake will occur and the size ofthe fault plane of an impending earthquake.

3.      Crustal processes taking place near faults of earthquakes that occurred hundreds of years ago can be observed decades before the sudden onset of a new large earthquake.

4.      No two earthquakes nor their preparatory processes are the same. We learn a lot about an impending earthquake by observing preparatory processes at the fault, finding the constitutive relationship that governs the processes, and then extrapolating that relationship into the future. Therefore, our approach to predicting an earthquake has a number of stages: finding the fault, monitoring the preparatory processes of the fault as precisely as possible, using our new understanding gained from the fault processes, and extrapolating this understanding to the close environment, to gradually ascertain the site, size, and time of the next large earthquake. Such real-time research (investigating every individual fault that is deemed suspicious) must be multidisciplinary and constrained by usingall available observations when modeling the ongoing process.

5.      Useful warnings canbe issued along the way, from the time we discover a fault showing signs of preparatory processes, which predicts the site of occurrence, right up to the time of rupture. Such warnings could be issued to the local Civil Protection group that finds itself closest to the fault by government agencies in cooperation with scientists and include information about how the group should prepare forthe earthquake and directives on enhanced observations.

6.      The real-time monitoring and real-time research necessary to establish earthquake warnings is not only expensive, it is labor-intensive as well. However, humanity is the beneficiary of such investment. We are duty-bound to learn all we can about theforces of the Earth and their underlying processes in an effort to make t asafer place.

（see Stefansson R., 2011, Advances in Earthquake Prediction: Seismic Research and Risk Mitigation，Springer，pp264）