that an earthquake would soon hit at the westernmost point of California, south of the small coastal city of Eureka.

Two months later, a magnitude 7.3 struck the site in northern California - putting millions under a tsunami warning and growing Mr Dmitruk following online as they turned to him to forecast the next one. "So to people who dismiss what I do, how can you argue it's just a coincidence. It requires serious skill to figure out where earthquakes will go," he said on New Year’s Eve. But there's one problem: earthquakes can't be predicted, scientists who study them say.

And it's exactly that unpredictability that makes them so unsettling. Millions of people living on the west coast of North America fear that "the big one" could strike at any moment, altering landscapes and countless lives.

Lucy Jones, a seismologist who worked for the US Geological Survey (USGS) for more than three decades and authored a book called The Big Ones, has focused much of her research on earthquake probabilities and improving resiliency to withstand such cataclysmic events. For as long as she has studied earthquakes, Ms Jones said there have been people wanting an answer to when "the big one" - which means different things in different regions - will happen and claiming to have cracked the code.

"The human need to make a pattern in the face of danger is extremely strong, it is a very normal human response to being afraid," she told the BBC. "It doesn't have any predictive power, though." (BBC/Getty Images)