Animal Earthquake

So, given that there's no evidence yet showing that animals can predict quakes, people should be skeptical about these claims, he said.

1. Can Animals Predict Earthquakes?.
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Instead, it's likely that these animals are responding to foreshocks, that is, mild tremors that precede violent shaking, rather than predicting the earthquake itself, he said. Woith noted that the public often contacts the GMZ after strong earthquakes, and that people commonly ask "whether we can predict earthquakes or not, because there are so many reports on the internet that an animal could do it. The records included all kinds of behaviors, including a tiger that reportedly got depressed before an earthquake, Woith said.

Despite the vast number of alleged incidences, good information was sparse, Woith said. The researchers found that 90 percent of all reported cases happened within 62 miles kilometers of the epicenter and within 60 days of an earthquake.

References

Then, they examined when and where foreshocks had happened in the region. The resemblance was remarkable, they found. To better study whether animals can predict earthquakes, Woith and his colleagues suggested that researchers ask a number of yes-or-no questions in any upcoming experiments, including "Is the experimental setup and monitoring procedure clearly described and reproducible?

1. THE ORDINARY PRINCE.
2. The Fenway Project (SABR Digital Library Book 13).
3. Can Animals Predict Earthquakes? | Seismological Society of America?
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5. Trayendo a Joy al Amor y al Perdon (Spanish Edition).
6. SAS 177 Pirates ! (French Edition)!
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Meanwhile, humans are working on technologies that can detect earthquakes seconds before they hit. For instance, a beta smartphone application called Quake Alert helped alert people in Los Angeles that an earthquake was coming about half a minute before it struck on April 5, , Live Science previously reported. For a long time, one of the better-known methods for predicting earthquakes came from Northern California.

Widespread repetition of this belief led to a general acceptance among many people. Finally, in , one seismologist had had enough, and published a detailed statistical analysis of the claims and found that there was not the slightest bit of truth to it. But all this really says is that if animals can sense quakes, escaping from their owners in San Jose isn't the way they show it. An interesting proposal is the idea that animals would have evolved behavior to protect them from earthquakes. We know that many animals are able to sense P-waves a few seconds before the destructive part of the earthquake hits.

What would be required for an evolutionary behavior to form would be the deaths of some animals who fail to react during those few seconds. There are not really all that many ways for an earthquake to kill an animal. Burrow collapse is one and tsunami action is another. If, over countless millennia, enough animals left burrows and ran for higher ground whenever faint vibrations were detected, it is conceivable that such a behavior could form.

However, when we read the anecdotes of altered animal behavior prior to an earthquake, the reported behaviors are all over the map, but they are not either of these two behaviors. This raises an important point, which is the inherent unreliability of almost all reports of animal behavior prior to a quake. It is that such behavior is almost never noticed, recalled, or described until after the quake, at which point the reports are uselessly biased by expectations and ex post facto analysis.

There is, however, one part of the world where seismologists do pay attention to such reports, and log them, year round: Let's find out why. Only once has animal behavior been claimed to have successfully predicted an earthquake: An evacuation order was issued, and estimates have been made that as many as , lives were probably saved.

There are numerous reports of animals behaving strangely in the days leading up to the quake. In nearly all its mentions in the literature, this prediction has been held up as a shining example of the plausibility of earthquake prediction, and of the role of animals in particular. However, under closer scrutiny, the story largely falls apart. For some weeks, the region had been getting struck by a long series of foreshocks, any one of which is statistically just as likely be the last in a cluster of earthquakes.

During this whole period, Chinese officials were making various predictions of larger quakes and issuing various evacuation orders. They were almost all false alarms, and this was a pattern that had long been common in China and continues through today.

Nearly all the predictions are wrong. It just so happened that in this one case, a major earthquake did follow. If it hadn't been for the series of smaller quakes — which do not precede most large earthquakes and are not predictable themselves — it's unlikely that there would have been evacuation orders preceding the large quake. As far as what role the animals may have played, all information reported about this has been anecdotal. Not even the Chinese themselves have established any kind of guidelines for what constitutes predictive behavior or how it would be distinguished from non-predictive behavior.

Even today, the vast majority of research into the animal predictions comes from China, and also from Japan, which lacks even China's one example of a successful earthquake prediction.

• Transfigured.
• Oneiro Book II - Gauntlet.
• Treasures of Midnight Lights;
• References & Further Reading.
• Animal Earthquake Prediction.

In those two countries, the belief that animal behavior is a reliable predictor of earthquakes is nearly universal, supported mainly — it appears — by little more than the confirmation bias established by the Haicheng case, as well as a lengthy cultural tradition. The myth continues to be recycled in the news, and one strong reason is that every so often, a fringe paper gets published somewhere making highly suspect claims that animals have been been demonstrated to have foreknowledge of earthquakes.

Whenever such a paper gets published, it invariably gets picked up by mass media news sources, further distorted and exaggerated, and duly impacts the public's perception of the phenomenon. One notable example was in , when headlines flashed around the world — in major news outlets and consumer magazines — that scientists have found animals can predict earthquakes up to three weeks in advance. I read this paper several times, and my best description of it is "miraculously bizarre". The paper centered around a statistical analysis of the number of animals captured on game cameras inside one Peruvian national park over a day period prior to a magnitude 7 earthquake, and found that the number of animals spotted was lower than in other day periods that did not precede large quakes.

They even concluded the most likely cause for the reduced animal activity, which I must quote: They did not take into account other factors that may have a much larger impact on animal activity, such as weather or season.

My dog Sophie senses 6.5 earthquake in Eureka at the Times-Standard - All three segments

The authors began with two unsupported assertions, first that "positive airborne ions" are "known to be aversive to animals"; and second, they repeated a variation of a plausible notion popular among ball lightning and earthquake light enthusiasts, which claims that earthquakes produce massive electrical charges in the ground though in this case they said that charge fluctuates and produces Ultra Low Frequency radiation. They correlated this to a space weather event, basically nighttime aurora activity, associated with Very Low Frequency radiation, and suggested some unconvincing connection between the two.

This event was about a week before the quake, when they said animal activity began to be at its lowest. In short, the entire paper was a word salad combining bits and pieces from a number of unrelated fields, many of which stem from the world of pseudoscience, and then drew a causal effect to a decline in animal activity prior to an earthquake — ironically, exactly the opposite of what nearly all other advocates claim, which is that animal activity increases before an earthquake.

It was an outlier result among a community of fringe ideas, and yet it was sufficient to saturate the world's news with a report that animals can indeed predict earthquakes three weeks in advance. This paper should stand as a powerful reminder that we should always be highly skeptical of astounding new science discoveries reported in the mass media.

What we're left with is a series of somewhat far-out answers in search of a question. The purpose of a theory is to explain an observation, and in this case, we don't really have an observation.



We have countless anecdotes of unusual animal behavior, but they vary so widely — and all are well within the range of normal animal activity — that it's by no means clear that an explanation might be needed. We lack both a plausible mechanism by which animals could predict quakes, and evidence that they might do so. Until either of those changes — which, considering the enormous amount of research that's been thrown at this so far, seems unlikely — the idea that animals can predict earthquakes is on very shaky ground.