They should try to forecast earthquakes, that would really be a breakthrough If anything better than random comes out
Forecasting earthquakes via ML should be possible but is very strongly limited by data. We have ~50 years of reasonably good seismological catalogs for most of the world. The seismic cycle (the sequence of major earthquake, reloading, major earthquake on a single section of fault) is generally thousands of years except at the fastest-slipping faults. There are very few sections of faults where we have seismological observations of multiple events, and for >90% of faults, we don't even know when the last earthquake was. There are geologic methods to help with this, but they are labor intensive and often yield error bars of hundreds to thousands of years, because the earthquakes don't produce radiocarbon signatures directly; the geologists use e.g. charcoal older and younger layers as available to bracket the timing, and many faults do not have suitable geologic sites to preserve the earthquake deformation and bracket the timing.
I do think it's possible that thorough exploration of the data that do exist can yield broader patterns that apply to many regions, but earthquake behavior has a lot of complexities and different fault systems may behave differently.
A lot of the hope is for coupling physical simulators to ML and the existing datasets to better understand the physics and then work from there, but this is typically cutting-edge HPC work, which limits the pace of research and the number of researchers.