Long range correlation in earthquake precursory signals

Research on earthquake prediction has drawn serious attention of the geophysicist, geologist and investigators in different fields of science across the globe for many decades. Researchers around the world are actively working on recording pre-earthquake changes in non-seismic parameters through a variety of methods that include anomalous changes in geochemical parameters of the Earth’s crust, geophysical properties of the lithosphere as well as ionosphere etc. Several works also have been done in India to detect earthquake precursor signals using geochemical and geophysical methods. However, very few works have been done so far in India in this field through the application of nonlinear techniques to the recorded geophysical and geochemical precursory signals for earthquakes. The present paper deals with a short review of the early works on geochemical precursors that have been carried out in India as yet. With a view to detect earthquake precursory signals by means of gas-geochemical method we developed a network of seismo-geochemical monitoring observatories in India in hot springs and mud volcano crater. In the last few years we detected several geochemical anomalies and those were observed prior to some major earthquakes that occurred within a radius of 1500?km from the test sites. In the present paper we have applied nonlinear techniques to the long term, real-time and natural data sets of radon-222 and associated gamma originated out of the terrestrial degassing process of the earth. The results reveal a clear signature of the long range correlation present in the geochemical time series. This approach appears to be a potential tool to explore intrinsic information hidden within the earthquake precursory signals.