Chinese scientists claim they received an ominous signal hours before Monday night’s 6.2 magnitude earthquake but were not sure where exactly it would strike, it emerged on Wednesday.

So far 131 people are confirmed dead and over 700 others injured in Gansu and Qinghai after the quake, the deadliest in nine years, hit the two provinces.

While predicting earthquakes has almost appeared to be a mission impossible, researchers in the Chinese province of Shaanxi claim to have developed a groundbreaking technique that has allowed them to forecast successfully every tremor with a magnitude of 7.0 or more that struck around the globe in the past 10 years.

But to their dismay, there is still no way to predict the location of these earthquakes, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post newspaper reported.

The team uses high-precision equipment to monitor the Earth's gravitational field at low frequencies, looking for abnormalities in gravitational waves that could be a warning sign an earthquake is imminent.

The researchers first realised that the latest earthquake was on the way when they received a text alert about abnormal data readings from multiple sensors on Friday morning.

The team then began discussing where the earthquake might strike and, in the afternoon before it hit Gansu and Qinghai provinces, Zhang Maosheng, a professor and dean at Xian Jiaotong University, was thinking: “We need to forecast a location as soon as possible.” By this point, the team had already calculated that the earthquake had a high probability of hitting within three to five days of the abnormal data readings being recorded.

They were also able to predict that the magnitude of the earthquake would be around 6.27 based on the strength of the data peaks observed, Zhang was quoted as saying in the report.

But they could not forecast that the earthquake was about to happen in a province bordering theirs. “[We] didn’t think it would be this close,” Zhang said.

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