I live in Iceland and we try to predict volcanic activity all the time and it’s off by weeks or months. To be fair, that’s a blink of an eye on a geological scale so it’s pretty accurate but the nature of the problem is that you have so many forces that all interact with each other.

It’s pretty similar to “how far can you tip the chair back before it falls” but we don’t know the size, weight and shape of the chair really well. You just need one fracture in the rock from previous earthquake to throw all the calculations off.

I don’t know the context of the post but I imagine it’s media related, like a seismologist saying “could be as soon as tomorrow” and the journalist just saying “earthquake tomorrow”. Also seismologist don’t shut up is true.