Face to Face: Dr. Birger-Gottfried Lühr, German Research Center for Geosciences

Ingolf Baur: "Joining us in the studio is Dr. Birger-Gottfried Lühr from the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam. He is an expert on earthquake risk assessment and early warning systems. What do you think, is there a chance to predict earthquakes by studying ants? Dr. Birger-Gottfried Lühr: "We know there are many examples that after an event, animals have shown an animal behavior. But in before, therefore we have to understand exactly the behavior of such kind of creatures, and this is a problem, the same problem more or less with the earthquake itself. The earth is a highly complicated, complex system and our knowledge is up to now is too low that we can make predictions, therefore we concentrate more on risk minimization and hazard assessment." "But let’s look at the prediction just a little while. Because the ants actually react to gas and they react to the warmth. Are there any physical parameters that really change before an earthquake comes?" "What they do and what is obviously, is that they can find the active fault zones. Ok, this is a first step that I learned something about the fault system and which fault is active. That means which may cause the earthquake, but this is not enough. What, the music plays and ... you can say ... at eight or ten kilometer depths, so we have to learn something about or know something about the stress build-up in eight, nine, ten kilometer depths. And then this information has to come to the surface. And this makes it really difficult." "And you don't believe that animals have some kind of hidden senses, so they might detect something that happens ten kilometers below the ground?" "I know that of course animals are just in contact with researcher here is dealing, is investigating the behavior of bees and also, it is amazing what bees can do. But nevertheless, I at the moment, I have problems that we can solve this with one animal or one system. So our idea is because of the complexity, is to work in a ...

Channel: Deutsche Welle Video Length: 4m 9s Date Found: Mon, Aug 23 2010 4:11 PM Category: Science Date Produced: View Count: 0