Over the next week, Southern California has only a 27 percent chance of experiencing a third earthquake greater than magnitude 6, but a 96 percent chance of going through a tremor of magnitude 5 or higher.
Those precise probabilities were generated by scientists at the United States Geological Survey, using models based on long-standing principles of seismic behavior and decades of data on aftershocks from earthquakes.
But the same predictive power does not extend to forecasting when and where earthquakes will strike in the first place, experts acknowledge.