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4 September HOW TO PREDICT EARTHQUAKES -- Where To LookThursday April 7, 2005
HOW TO PREDICT EARTHQUAKES -- Where To Look
This Friday, April 8th, marks a big day in the science of earthquake prediction. On Friday there will be an eclipse of the sun. Both the sun and the moon will be lined up and in the same place in the sky. Their combined gravitational pulls will produce a large tide in the oceans, along with a smaller tidal rise in the crust of the earth. Will that tidal rise cause a large earthquake?
The most well known of the earthquake predictors is Jim Berkland. For about 15 years, Jim's website (syzygyjob.org) and newsletter have been predicting major quakes based on the phases of the moon. I first met Jim in 1987 when he gave a presentation in my area. For several years we regularly communicated by phone.
Since the 1960's I had been clipping stories about earthquakes out of the newspaper and then looking up the phases of the moon in the Old Farmers Almanac. That was not a very scientific study. But I was convinced that earthquakes did seem to be connected to the phases of the moon. And if the relationship could be determined then earthquakes could be predicted.
In 1987, I used the early Internet to obtain from the USGS a complete set of all major earthquakes in the world since 1900. There were just over 6,300 recorded quakes in the dataset. It took me several months to write a program to assign the 3-dimensional positions of the moon at each instant of the quakes. It took another several months to analyze the data to find out if more earthquakes occurred during a new or full moon when the tidal forces were greatest.
What I found was quite disturbing. There was no correlation to the phases of the moon. The earthquakes seemed to be randomly distributed around the lunar cycle. To confirm my results, I even made another set of data made from 6,300 randomly assigned quakes and repeated the analysis. The chart for both the random quakes and the real USGS record of quakes seemed to be identical. The obvious conclusion was that the new and full moon did not cause quakes.
I was still convinced that the major trigger for earthquakes was the moon. But how? I repeated the analysis of my dataset using the closeness of the moon to see if more quakes occurred during lunar perigee when the tidal force was greatest. Again a seemingly random distribution. When I tried to related quakes to the height of the moon above and below the earth's equator, there seemed to be weak peak in earthquakes at maximum north or south declination.
But when I combined the declination with the lunar phases, a strong peak in quakes popped out of the data, occurring within two days of the maximum forces. The declination was the stronger factor. When the moon was at maximum above or below the equator and near a new or full moon, the chances were about 90 percent that an earthquake would occur. There were several other minor factors such as the height of the sun above and below the earth's equator which also determined when a quake would occur.
Most scientists believe that earthquakes are caused by random motions within the earth's crust and mantle. And thus are unpredictable. What my analysis shows is that, unlike what most scientists believe, most earthquakes are caused by forces external to the earth, mostly from the sun and the moon. What is confusing is that it is not the simple gravitational or tidal forces which cause the earthquakes.
The primary cause of earthquakes is the forces which are lateral or along the surface of the earth. These are caused by the earth acting like a gyroscope and the off-equator forces from the sun and moon creating angular momentum forces along the surface. The new and full moon tidal forces from the moon only cause up and down motions in the crust, but they don't cause the crust to move. And it is the lateral motion of the crust which causes earthquakes.
The chart at the bottom of the BroJon Gazette front page shows the maximum lateral forces caused by the gyroscopic angular momentum due to the off-equator motions of the sun and moon.
I had been a long-time reader of the Old Farmer's Almanac. In the Ephemeris section of the Almanac for each day there are little symbols for the new and full moon and also the words "moon runs high" or "moon runs low." Like most readers, I didn't pay much attention to those entries.
It wasn't until the 1970's when I noticed that most earthquakes seem to occur when the moon was "high" or "low" and it was within a day or so of the new or full moon. It took me another 10 years to build my own computer and program it with USGS data to prove that's when the earthquakes occurred.
Jim Berkland's lunar phase tidal force method predicts a major quake on Friday April 8 due to the solar eclipse on that day. The BroJon equations say, not so. The maximum lateral forces which cause the earth's crust to move will occur a week later on April 14th. This is when the lunar tides will actually be the smallest. This then is a very good test of the two methods of earthquake prediction to see which is more accurate.
And what if a major earthquake does occur but not on either April 8 or April 14, but instead right in the middle on April 11? Well, back to the drawing board, and Jim and I can still remain friends.
----------------------------- M
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