Аннотация:Many years of experience with research in different test ranges in different parts of the world, related to the prediction of strong earthquakes, provide evidence, with indisputable clarity, of the existence of significant variations of all the geophysical parameters considered in such research. However, despite the use of every possible method
for evaluating and filtering the initial information, it has not been possible to establish the existence of an unambiguous cause-and-effect relationship between the observed variations of parameters or their filtered residues and the times of occurrence of strong earthquakes. It evidently must be admitted that predictive research has attained that stage when the problem involves not so much a continuing lengthening of the time series of analyzed parameters but a study of their spectral-time properties and a comparison of different
variations with the times of occurrence of strong earthquakes (although this itself is also necessary), as in a concentration of efforts in the direction of fundamental research on the very nature of appearance of variations of the values of geophysical parameters.
We feel that one of the most important aspects of such research is a decision between the alternatives: are the actually observed variations of a local nature caused by geotectonic and physicochemical processes in the immediate neighborhood of the place of observation of the variation, or are these phenomena attributable to a higher degree to regional or global processes, such as the geodynamic regime of collision of lithospheric plates, triggering effects due to redistribution of stresses after the occurrence of very strong earthquakes, tidal forces in the solid earth, nonuniformity of the earth's rotation, global variaitons
of the values of the gravitational constant, etc.? The postulated migration of a front of deformation of crustal material has been the most discussed in the literature in the class of possible regional causes for the occurrence of variations of geophysical parameters. We feel that this hypothesis requires the most careful attention in the light of the problem formulated above. Accordingly, we will discuss below the status of research on this problem in considerable detail.