LOS ANGELES (AP) — The East Coast earthquake left more than just residents unaccustomed to feeling the ground shake and sway in a daze. It also surprised some scientists who spend their careers trying to untangle the mysteries of sudden ground shifts.

Despite decades of research, earthquake prediction remains elusive. As much as society would like scientists to tell us when a jolt is coming, mainstream seismologists are generally pessimistic about ever having that ability.

They lived through the checkered history of earthquake prediction, filled with passioned debates, failed oracles and the enduring search for warning signs that may portend a powerful quake. The Earth so far has refused to give up its secrets.

In recent years, however, a more hopeful camp has emerged, pushed by researchers using satellites who say it may be possible to someday predict earthquakes from space and others who think they can tease out signals in rocks. The two schools of thought swapped notes during a two-day meeting in Los Angeles weeks before a relatively mild magnitude-5.8 rattled the Eastern Seaboard.

“I was pretty skeptical going in and I remain skeptical,” said Washington state seismologist John Vidale, who was among 44 scientists from around the world who attended the invitation-only meeting.

Geophysicist Malcolm Johnston with the U.S. Geological Survey agreed.

“I’ve been chasing this for a long time,” he said. “If you think you can detect the start of an earthquake, it’s going to be very, very difficult.”

How earthquakes occur is well known. The Earth’s crust is like a giant jigsaw puzzle, broken into several pieces known as tectonic plates that constantly bump and grind or slide past each other. The movement happens slowly, about the speed at which our fingernails grow. Eventually, there’s enough pent-up stress and the rocks suddenly slip, releasing tremendous energy that we feel as shaking.

Most earthquakes are small and imperceptible. Occasionally, a powerful one wreaks havoc like the ones that ravaged Haiti last year and coastal Japan in March. No one knows how a small rumble can cascade into a big one.

Spurred in part by a pair of megaquakes in the 1960s, scientists began looking in earnest for signals that will help them distinguish a serious quake from the garden variety. Hopes were high for reading the seismic tea leaves. They scoured for anything and everything that might be a clue: warping in the Earth’s crust, radon gas releases along a fault, weird weather and even the behavior of cockroaches, snakes and other animals.

None of the phenomena studied panned out, but the notion that animals might have a “sixth sense” persists to today.

Keepers at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. reported that lemurs, a gorilla and an orangutan were restless and making noises minutes before the East Coast quake on Aug. 23. Scientists say animals can sometimes feel the first arriving seismic waves before people do, but this happens after a fault has ruptured. In other words, the earthquake has already begun.