A research team led by Professor Lee Jin Han of Korea University (KU) found that the 2017 Pohang earthquake was quantitatively predictable using modern technology. The research team proved its predictive abilities and analyzed small earthquake data that took place while injecting water into geothermal power plants.

Prior to the Pohang earthquake, most seismologists used the traffic light system, which was created by calculating the ratio between the amount of injected water and the largest earthquake worldwide. However, shortly after the Pohang earthquake, Professor Lee’s research team claimed that the aforementioned relationship was inapplicable to many cases, most notably the Pohang earthquake. They also claimed that since water was directly injected into the underground fault zone as unusual, the scale of the earthquake was much larger than anticipated. Moreover, they proposed a new strategy to predict the maximum scale of earthquake during water injection using the seismogenic index.

The paper was published in Nature Communications, a famous science magazine. KU expects that the newly introduced method using the seismogenic index will be used to establish a new traffic light system, which is essential for securing seismic stability when constructing geothermal power plants.