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Take 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

• moftz 7y ago
  What 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 ago
    I'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 ago
      Why 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 ago
  Sure, 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 ago
    It'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 ago
        Pigeons 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 ago
        I 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 ago
  Care to elaborate on why you call it pseudoscience? I disagree
  • Raphmedia 7y ago
    I meant accurate forecasting based on those is pseudoscience. The phenomenons themselves are real.
• wrycoder 7y ago
  Pseudoscience? 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 ago
    I meant accurate forecasting based on those is pseudoscience. The phenomenons themselves are real.
    • noodlenotes 7y ago
      To 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 ago
        I'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.