Scientists use computer models to help in the effort to predict future earthquakes.
Find out more on modeling earthquakes. The problem with earthquakes is they generally reoccur on time scales of decades to centuries to thousands of years, so we're sampling a very very small part of that whole system. When an earthquake occurs along a fault, it can have a triggering effect that can cause another quake on a neighboring fault. Predicting which of these occurs is the aim of geophysicists. Right now we look at individual faults, but what we are moving towards very quickly is understanding how earthquake systems behave, so we want to see how faults interact with each other.