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The Japanese have dreamed of the possibility of a warning system for earthquakes for centuries. They are coming closer to making that dream a reality, thanks to the work of the country's most eminent remote sensing scientist.

Shunji Murai from the University of Tokyo filed a patent with the Japanese patent office in 2006, in which he described a system using GPS towers to monitor land movement.

But authorities have been hesitant to lend their support to the system. While legislation forces local government agencies to provide warning systems for citizens in case of tsunami, storms, floods and other hazards, earthquakes are excluded.

'They are considered to be too difficult,’ says Dr Murai. But Dr Murai's results, derived by monitoring thousands of GPS towers, shows that there are precursor events to an earthquake. As tectonic movement causes stress to build in the Earth's crust, it compresses the land. This compression can be identifed by monitoring the areas of triangles marked out by the GPS stations.

Murai says the technology is now good enough to predict the location of an earthquake to within one hundred kilometres. The problem is that it is still difficult to predict the time; it could be 24 hours or 24 years away. Hopefully, further research will lead to better predictions.

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