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Most interesting is that interference began before the earthquakes hit. Is that already a datapoint that is being used in earthquake predictions?
by ljoshua 7y ago
Most interesting is that interference began before the earthquakes hit. Is that already a datapoint that is being used in earthquake predictions?
- TallGuyShort 7y agoThat is interesting... My first guess upon seeing the headline was that the earthquake could have caused some key point-to-point microwave links to be misaligned. But no - for those not reading the full article - it's actually an electromagnetic field caused by the earthquake being propagated up into the atmosphere...
- Raphmedia 7y agoTake with a grain of salt. This is pseudoscience at best. There were some reports of earthquake lights[1][2][3] and earthquake clouds[4][5][6] recently. There's some online communities dedicated to those, e.g. https://quakewatch.net/predictioncenter/ https://quakewatch.net/predictioncenter/ ___ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light [2] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/men-film-glowing-snake-like-16506345 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/men-film-glowing-sn... [3] https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/789760/Colorado-UFO-plunge-sky-speed-off-mystery-green-plasma-video https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/789760/Colorado-... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_cloud [5] https://weather.com/vertical/video/strange-clouds-seen-in-co-2 https://weather.com/vertical/video/strange-clouds-seen-in-co... [6] https://www.denverpost.com/2019/06/20/boulder-rare-helix-cloud/ https://www.denverpost.com/2019/06/20/boulder-rare-helix-clo... Edit: I mean accurate forecasting and prediction using this data is pseudoscience.
- moftz 7y agoWhat does that cloud formation have to do with earthquakes? That cloud was filmed in Boulder, not anywhere near southern California. The light thing seems pretty neat and there looks to be a bunch of possible explanations for the source. Although some of the videos I watched looked more like flashes of electricity coming from powerlines snapping or transformers blowing which could definitely happen if the earth was shifting.
- Raphmedia 7y agoI'm just the messenger, I have not spent any time researching the details of those claims. There's some overlapping between some online communities I participate in and the doomsday preppers/tracker community so that's why I stumbled on this. The Wikipedia page for Earthquake Lights talks about lights as far as 740 km from the epicenter, so I'd bet that's the answer people who associate those with the quakes will tell you. As I said take it with a grain of salt.
- zamalek 7y ago> What does that cloud formation have to do with earthquakes? Last I read about the alleged phenomena, you're supposedly looking for straight line or ripple clouds that form in seconds. The explanation is that some mechanism (originally friction) is boiling groundwater; but proponents can no longer agree on what mechanism leads to formation of the clouds.
- harshreality 7y agoWhy would earthquakes cause a significant amount of groundwater to boil? Supposing there were enough water vapor to do that, how would boiling groundwater form clouds at all, much less in seconds? There's still a lot of earth in the way between the fault and the sky. Ground shaking does not mean that energy is converted into heat. Does the ground feel hot after an earthquake? Warm at all? Earthquakes, right? Not volcanoes or magma chambers? If this phenomenon were real, wouldn't you expect it to occur right before a volcanic eruption, which actually involves large amounts of magma, near the surface, which could actually vaporize large amounts of groundwater? As far as I can tell, that doesn't happen either. The water vapor erupts with the molten rock, and mainly condenses into volcanic clouds because it has volcanic particles to condense around, not because the water vapor itself is enough to form clouds on its own before dissipating.
- ljoshua 7y agoSure, but it’s still an interesting observation. Seems like it would merit further investigation to see if there was a related causal mechanism.
- asdfman123 7y agoIt's more than just pseudoscience. There are reports of animals being able to predict earthquakes before they occur, and even records of other kinds of electromagnetic activity before quakes. I worked on a project at Stanford that set up EM sensors around the bay area to possibly detect signals before major earthquakes. I mean, right now it's all purely hypothetical but it's absolutely worth trying to find it if it's there, and compeltely within the realm of worthwhile science.
- maratumba 7y ago> There are reports of animals being able to predict earthquakes before they occur, and even records of other kinds of electromagnetic activity before quakes. There have been all kinds of tests with animals but so far, all animal behaviour that looks like predicting earthquakes is only their sensitivity to low amplitude-high speed P (pressure) waves, which humans usually don't feel.
- ficklepickle 7y agoPigeons are very sensitive to this. Apparently a survival instinct from making their home in cliff faces. It seems to trigger a flight reflex, it makes them take off real fast. I use a high voltage arc generator to scare pigeons off my deck. The sound from the arc seems to trigger the same response. It is certainly much more effective than yelling at them or waving one's arms around.
- asdfman123 7y agoI forgot the exact details of the research as I did it in undergrad, but I guarantee my academic adviser, the PhDs at the USGS, and the people providing the grant thought of that. There's evidence for real prediction, including reports of a ramp up EM energy a day before a quake.
- givinguflac 7y agoCare to elaborate on why you call it pseudoscience? I disagree
- Raphmedia 7y agoI meant accurate forecasting based on those is pseudoscience. The phenomenons themselves are real.
- wrycoder 7y agoPseudoscience? From TFA: ““The earthquakes show up as RF noise because of the electric field lines, now scientifically confirmed to change the way the ionosphere reflects RF,” Schwarz said. Schwarz has cited an article in the October 2018 edition of Scientific American, which, he says, explains the phenomenon. (See Erik Vance’s “Earthquakes in the sky,” Scientific American, October 2018, p. 44.)“
- Raphmedia 7y agoI meant accurate forecasting based on those is pseudoscience. The phenomenons themselves are real.
- noodlenotes 7y agoTo me, "pseudoscience" means that the approach isn't grounded in the scientific method. It's not pseudoscience to collect data to try to predict a phenomenon, even if the prediction isn't successful. That's like saying "well, we set up this experiment to test if there's a link between x and y, but when we looked at data in this one particular way, the results weren't significant so this entire field is pseudoscience."
- Raphmedia 7y agoI'm sure scientists could find a way to use this data. What I'd call pseudoscience is people online sharing photos of clouds and then stocking on water and food. You are right that it is scientific, but it's dangerous to make claims like this.
- birdman3131 7y agoAs I read the article it is possible to notice them after the fact but difficult to tell the difference between them and the normal changes as you go from day to night thus making prediction dicey at best.
- phonethrowaway 7y agoYou mean like this? http://ericpdollard.com/2014/06/23/the-landers-facility-of-eric-dollard-and-walter-deroche/ http://ericpdollard.com/2014/06/23/the-landers-facility-of-e...
- maratumba 7y agoSeismologist here. So far, no reliable predictor of main shocks (largest earthquake in a sequence) has been found. People have been looking for them ever since the invention of the modern seismometer networks in the 60s. Most of the EM based earthquake prediction is based on really loose reasoning. In summary, it goes like this: "earthquakes can generate EM fields through piezo-electric effect, therefore small movements before big earthquakes should generate small EM fields we can measure". But there is almost never no such thing as "small movements before big earthquakes", which is why reliably predicting them has been impossible so far. Most likely, this will turn out to be an example of confirmation bias. In the unlikely event that it is not, people will be all over this.
- jofer 7y agoTo be fair, there are some well documented EM precursors. The most classic is from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/GL017i009p01465%4010.1002/%28ISSN%291944-8007.LOMAPRIE1 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/GL01... Recently, some fairly convincing ionospheric-related (i.e. GPS delay) precursors have also been observed before Tohoku and (less convincingly) several other major earthquakes. (e.g. Heki, 2011, Iwata & Umeno 2016, and several other references I forget. Mostly from the same couple research groups.) We don't have a full mechanism to explain them (or, rather, there are a lot of competing mechanisms that don't fully explain things). More importantly, precursors don't seem to occur consistently as you noted. However, they're also not worth automatically dismissing. The idea that they're all a simple case of confirmation bias has been extensively discussed, and while it's not currently possible to refute, it's starting to seem less likely. There's certainly been a lot more attention given to possible precursors and mechanisms in the last 5 years than there were before. It's a serious avenue of research right now. Keep an eye out then next time you're at AGU. I guarantee you you'll see at least a few posters around possible precursors and/or precursor mechanisms. Forecasting is definitely pseudoscience, but EM-related precursors are a fairly hot (and controversial) research topic at the moment.
- bsder 7y ago> Forecasting is definitely pseudoscience, but EM-related precursors are a fairly hot (and controversial) research topic at the moment. It's not pseudoscience because it can be disproven--which is generally what happens. The issue that everybody forgets is that predictions have FOUR outcomes, not two. You have the one everybody remembers: "I predicted X and X happened". You have the one some people remember: "I didn't predict X and X didn't happen." You have the one that people rarely remember: "I predicted X and X didn't happen." You have the one nobody remembers: "I didn't predict X, but X happened." The problem is that for rare events, the "predict X and not X" and "didn't predict X but X" have to be REALLY low probability for a measure to be useful.