Predicting Earthquakes???
Posted by JAC on 1/14/2010, 6:57 am
January 14th, 2010 at 3:04 am by Bill Steffen under Bill's Blog, Weather

The devastation and loss of life in such a natural disaster as Haiti just breaks my heart.

Is there something, somewhere that might lead us to predict, maybe not where, but maybe when earthquakes might be more apt to occur.  

Have you seen the video of the dog that seems to sense the earthquake and runs away seconds before the earthquake starts (on Jan. 9 in northern California)?  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG5w7oo-vak

I got to thinking about a blog entry I wrote this summer, which you can see here:  when I wrote about the strange behavior of the sun of late.

Take a moment and read what I wrote then.

http://blogs.woodtv.com/2009/08/22/declining-number-of-sunspots/








I thought about including the school of thought that a decline in sunspot activity or changes in the sun might be related to an increase in earthquake activity.  

I'm not a geologist (though I do have a degree in Physical Geography as well as Atmospheric Science and did take a couple of geology courses), so hopefully someone with more knowledge than me could make a sensible comment.  

Is this correlation without causation (like: all criminals drank milk when they were children, therefore milk makes some men criminals)?, is it a weak correlation of little merit?  

Or is there a clue here?  

The sun has been in an extended sunspot minimum for a relatively long time, the longest minimum since at least since 1913 and the last peak was lower than the previous peak.  

We had the monster equake off Indonesia on Dec. 26, 2004, the Kashmir, Pakistan quake of 2005 (86,000 dead), the Sichuan, China quake in 2008 (70,000 dead) and now the Haitian equake.  

We also had a magnitude 6.5 earthquake in northern California on Jan. 9.  

That's a significant number of strong earthquakes in a relatively short time.  

There's also a school of thought that says that earthquakes are more common near perihelion, when the sun is closest to the Earth in the first week of January.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0523_050523_moonquake_2.html


Suzanne Geha showed a graph on our news Weds. evening listing the six deadliest earthquakes in world history.  

Three of the quakes have occurred since late 2004 during this sunspot minimum.  

Three of these six deadliest earthquakes and in fact the three strongest of the six occurred within three weeks of perihelion.  

The most intense earthquake series in the U.S. was the New Madrid quakes, the first two of which were on Dec. 16, 1811 - again within three weeks of perihelion.  

The Northridge equake near Los Angeles occurred on Jan. 17, 1994 (72 dead, 9,000 injured) again within 3 weeks of perihelion.  

The New Madrid fault, the southeast U.S., the Pacific NW, Alaska, even California - all areas where very strong earthquakes have occurred in the past.  

It's been a long time since we had a devastating earthquake in the U.S.  

I feel uneasy as I see large earthquakes in various places.

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Topography Along the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden Fault, Haiti - JAC, 1/14/2010, 6:48 am
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