An Experiment in Alternative Methods of Earthquake Prediction

Bingo. Chile.

earthquake.usgs.gov...

Not sure this is it though. Still feeling China for some reason, possibly more South America. My friend had the most insane left ear pain today, which could have been Chile but can also be China/India/Afghanistan etc. I had a dream earlier today where I got the coordinates 34.2/100.1 which is smack dab in central China so who knows. I never put too much stock in dreams as they tend to not mean what they seem to mean but we shall see...

Feeling a lot of Wasatch/New Madrid symptoms today. Still a bit of SoCal/Mex/central america. My anger, anxiety and 'heavy' feeling dissipated as soon as the Chile quake hit so not sure if that was all I was feeling for that area, but it would seems so.

And where is everyone? This thread is pretty quiet. I need other perspectives to narrow down my country/continent wide (and as such useless in my book) predictions!

SF Pier 39 Sea Lions Have Mysteriously Disappeared

Just a little 'heads up' to those living in N. California, between Eureka, (including the SF Bay Area), and the Hollister area. Stay alert this week. This could be an earthquake precursor. Possibly offshore N. California as well, around Petrolia.

There was also a recent case of whales beaching in New Zealand.

New Zealand Whale Beaching

It's also interesting to note, that in the referenced news story, it's mentioned that the sea lions first colonized the pier in 'late 1989'. In mid-October, on the 17th, the 7.2 Loma Prieta earthquake struck the south SF bay area.

I read in another story that some of the tagged sea lions from Pier 39 have shown up near Monterey, approximately 112 miles south of SF on the California coast. Curious.

Been a while since i posted here,it`s been getting active around the midlands in the uk lately.
We had a couple of months of quiet but now the tremors are picking up.
They are 2.1 or below in magnitude but they are definately getting more frequent.
Recent uk earthquakes
Although i have not seen them above 1.9 until recently.

reply to post by kattraxx


and

reply to post by kattraxx


Hi Kat,

I'm replying to both your posts in one as they are related. Most peculiar, this. Just yesterday I was looking at the USGS world quake map as I do every day, and suddenly "west coast USA" came into my mind. Now, I often muse upon that region but mainly in an abstract and wondering way. This came to me more like a statement. So I was not totally surprised to get your email some hours ago asking to check your new posts here.

The sealions have been resident in that area for around 20 years, and now they just up and leave. Now, there could be a host of factors relating to why. They go where the food is, of course, so if their main food source is not so plentiful there for any reason, they'll likely head off to other places where they sense better pickings.

The main thing is, why their food source has diminished (if that's the reason). Again, it could be due to changes in water temp or quality, so it's a hard one to quantify.

However, there is also the possibility that they left the area because their "animal sense" picked up on something and they felt the need to move out. And as that news report points out, there have been no major changes in the fauna or water temperature in that area, which makes it hard to push the dietry argument as a major reason for them leaving.

I actually think that the "sense" scenario is no less likely than a dietry need and in this case might make more sense. (Sorry for the pun.) True, there are skeptics who still insist that animals have no such special sense (and ergo neither have people), but there is a body of evidence (some in this thread) that suggests otherwise.

To me, it's almost like the sea lions are saying, "Hey, something is not right here so we are getting out! If you can't figure that out, then good luck!"

I'll be keeping a close eye on that region. The multiple plate junctions there, especially the offshore Juan de Fuca subduction fault line, are known to produce quite dramatic seismic events, like the mag 9.0 on Jan 26, 1700. (I know that you know that but any new readers on this thread might not, unless they've trawled through the previous 100 or so pages. )

About the whale beachings down NZ way... They get them there not infrequently, often a week or so before a major seismic event, which can be even several 1000 km away. The 2004 quake/tsunami was preceded by beachings in that area, and if I recall aright, so was the more recent Solomon Islands tsunami.

So we'll have to see if it relates to an upcoming seismic event.

Regards,

Mike

Edited to add a few more remarks.


[edit on 2/1/10 by JustMike]

reply to post by tracey ace

Hi Tracey,

things are a bit spasmodic in respect of UK quakes and it seems that's always been the case. There is a period of quiet and then they pick up again. Hard to say what mechanisms might be the root cause. We have the same situation here in the Czech Republic.

Providing they stay in the mag 2 or 3 range then it's nothing to get concerned about. If you get a mag 4-plus then a few chimney pots might come down and that could be worrisome. I'm not being facetious, by the way. In a land where quakes of any "affecting" magnitude are rare, such an event could cause human harm and that's always cause for concern.

Mike

First of all, let me tell you that I haven't read this thread for a very long time, so that's why I want to know if the experiment has given good results or not.

On 2009-12-17 we had a 6.0 earthquake here in Portugal, and I didn't noticed anything before it.

reply to post by kattraxx


Magnitude 5.8 - BAJA CALIFORNIA MEXICO
2009 December 30 18:48:57 UTC

I was picking up the Baja EQ. The geothermal/volcanic precursors threw me off a bit, made me think NorCal. Turns out, the epicenter of the Baja EQ was in the geothermal fields of a dormant volcano, Cerro Prieto, which now makes sense to me.

So in reply to the question about the experiment being a success or not-- it's a learning process. As I mentioned to Mike, it's one thing to read what a precursor for a certain area might feel like--- but it's another thing to actually experience it. That, you don't forget. Since we began this experiment, there haven't been a lot of large mag EQ's in the western U.S. (where I tend to focus) in the past year and a half. It's the larger mag quakes that really teach you.

NorCal is still on my mind and I'll keep an eye on that area. Maybe it's because of those sea lions.

I discovered after a bit of research that the sea lions appeared on Pier 39 only weeks before the 7.2 Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. So... they arrived before a large mag EQ in NorCal and now they've suddenly gone. If I still lived in the SF bay area, I'd be a little extra aware... just in case.

reply to post by kattraxx

Thanks for the answer.

The behaviour of the sea lions is suspicious (I read about it on another thread), and being land and sea creatures they can have much more signs to interpret than those that are limited to one element.

reply to post by JustMike


Thanks for the reply,my main cause of concern is with the subsidence local to me.
There are some red spots which are being monitored by the British geoogical survey as there are quite a few houses suffering as they are built close to or on top of mines.Quite a few wobbly roads also.

A lot of the events that i have noticed closest to myself on the bgs website are collapse type events and my city has far too many tunnels.
A few roads have collapsed in the city as well as the countryside.

Flooding i believe to be a factor in all of this as the defences are 30 years out of date and brooks and streams that had been built over through the years have all been uncovered this past year.

It`s all been gradual,a little tremor here and there,but it had been ignored until the roads had to close.

reply to post by JustMike


i agree with you mike

both the whale beachings and the sea lions leaving leaves me to wonder if its remotely possible for two large quakes to happen say with in a 14 day period . lets just wait n see .

reply to post by ArMaP

Kat's already addressed your query but I'd like to respond as well, if I may.

I'll start by saying that we are not all using the same methodologies in terms of what we identify as precursors, although we have found that even so, we sometimes have agreement in respect of an event that actually transpires. For example, I generally speaking do not employ the sorts of personal sensory perception preceptors that Kat does, but we have both achieved some fair results.

In respect of the sensory perception preceptors it's important to note that they are to some degree regionally specific: if Kat for example picks up on something that to her indicates seismic/volcanic activity in the Baja region (as she more-or-less follows the guidelines of Charlotte King in this regard), it does not mean I can apply that indicator if I get an identical sensory perception preceptor, for the simple reason that I'm half-way around the world. I am subjected to different local influences in a region with entirely different geomorphology. So, I use other methods.

Someone could check by simply going back through my posts on this thread, but as best I recall, I had a success rate of around 60% on my predictions, meaning that the given predicted events occurred within the time frame and region I stated, as well as within about mag 1 of my stated magnitude. As my statements for location and time were quite specific (sometimes with lat. and long. given as well as the maximum number of days), I think that's not too bad.

I see no point in making predictions that go off months into the future. It makes the odds too much in the predictor's favor and doesn't really prove anything. Ditto for people on some sites who seem to think that predicting a mag 2-point something in an active region like Hawaii, California or Indonesia is a big deal, or when a mag 3-point something occurs and they predicted a high mag 5 or greater, then they take it as a hit.

Yeah, we could do that. We know where quakes happen pretty often. But that's not predicting, it just stating a certainty. So we only discuss low-mag quakes in any detail where they are either coming in larger numbers (as in swarms) and it's out of the ordinary, or when they happen in places where even such smaller events are fairly rare. Oh, I should add, we also take note of smaller quakes in a couple of regions we are interested in. like Nevada (where dingle events have a marked tendency to "disappear" and the "swarms" that occur go unexplained), Utah (ditto on the disappearing act), and around the Geysers region. But this discussion is about observation of what's going on, as well as prediction.

Back to my own predictions: with the ones that missed, only a few were total misses. Where they were, I tried my best to be diligent in saying so. Some I did not count as "hits" because they were outside my time frame by more than a day or so, or else they did not fit the magnitude range or location close enough. Some "predictors" on other sites who claim 90-plus percent accuracy would have taken them as hits. But we have a different motivation. This is not about attracting people to our site and building ourselves up (as we don't have one and we don't care who knows about us or not! lol!), or trying to collect ad revenue (ditto!), it's about collecting data that can be analyzed in more detail later.

Anyway it's all here on thread, and some of our results are also to be found on the "results" thread that was set up.

I think the most important thing is that we have stated our predictions and they are recorded here in this thread, along with the results. I have had no qualms about stating "no hit" where my predictions did not come to pass within the time frame and location that I gave; it's all useful data. But on the other hand I make less predictions anyway so it's easier to keep track of them.

But more than just the prediction side of it, we have accumulated a considerable number of references and resources on this thread, many of which could be of value to whoever reads. If nothing else, they are useful aids to learning.

It's also been a very refreshing thread in some ways because as best I can recall, we only had one troll. His name was RussianScientists, I believe. He ignored our posted predictions and claimed that he and only he had the secret to doing such things, but refused to post any details or predictions. Finally to try and make him put up or shut up, I posted a prediction, with time frame (3 days), magnitude (mag. 5 as a minimum), and even location marked in a circle on a map (along with lat and long stated), and it came in bang on target. Mag 5, three days, within the circle on the map.

We never heard from "comrade" RussianScientists again...

EDIT to add:

As it might be of interest I just hunted back and found the posts. Here's the original prediction post:
post by JustMike.


Here's the post with the results, after the quake occurred:
post by JustMike.


And this post explains the prediction methodology I employed in this case:
post by JustMike.


Mike

[edit on 3/1/10 by JustMike]

reply to post by tracey ace

Subsidence is a worry for sure. Are there many old mine sites in the area? They can be problematic. Ditto natural caverns.

Be interested to know more about this.

Mike

reply to post by alysha.angel

It's more than remotely possible; it does occur that two larger quakes happen in the same region within a shorter period. I've noted this in China, for example, where the quakes are too far away from each other for one to be considered as an aftershock to the other, but there could be some mechanism at work. The same goes for quakes in the region off the coast of Japan. I've noted some of these in the thread.

California is a real mess of fault lines and even the "San Andreas Fault" is not just one fault at all, but a whole series that are interconnected and which have very complex interactive components. This makes the work of determining what might happen there (and in what order) exceedingly difficult. It's also made more complicated due to the fact that the plate junctions off the coast and up into Oregon, on into Wash. and even Canada/Victoria, are under stress and in some places there has been no major release of that stress for about 300 years. This means that in theory, a largish quake in SoCal or central Cal could trigger a release along the Juan de Fuca subduction fault line -- and as the last time it happened it produced a mag 9 quake and a 30-metre (near 100 feet!) tsunami, that is not something we want to see in our lifetimes or those of our great-grandchildren, even.

There is the secondary factor that a major movement of that subduction zone would very likely trigger a surge in volcanic activity in the range that was actually created by this subduction process. It could lead to an eruption or two, even of volcanoes that have not been specially active of late.

I am very much wondering why those sea lions upped and left.

Mike


[edit on 3/1/10 by JustMike]

Duplicate post! How weird! Mods -- please delete! Thank you. Mike.

[edit on 3/1/10 by JustMike]

reply to post by JustMike

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

I will follow this thread more closely now.

Edit: is the above sentence correct? It doesn't sound good when I read it.

[edit on 3/1/2010 by ArMaP]

Yesterday in a response to a post by Kat, I mentioned that I've noticed the whale beachings in the New Zealand region have occurred shortly before major quakes, and I cited the 2004 quake/tsunami and the more recent Solomon Islands quake/tsunami as examples of these observations.

Well at 22.36 UTC (GMT) today, there was a Magnitude 7.2 quake in the Solomon Islands. Fortunately, according to the NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, no tsunami warning or watch is currently in effect for this event. So, that at least is good news.

I have no reports yet of damage from the quake itself. It's still a bit early for much detail to be coming in.

I find this occurrence of this seismic event in connection to the whale beachings more than merely coincidental.

Mike

A note to ArMaP: in my opinion, that sentence you asked about in your post is quite acceptable in modern English.

[edit on 3/1/10 by JustMike]

I haven't posted on this thread in a while, but I have continued to have 'symptoms' which I know now I can contribute to earthquake activity, in the last 5 days I have been through a multitude of symptoms, the most bothersome being clumsiness, vertigo. Last night it was siesmic flu, tonight, sleepiness is setting in, which usually indicates something pretty close to my own area, I am having trouble staying awake actually. We will see soon enough!

edit to add: Check this out, thousands of dead octopus on miles of beaches!

science.nasa.gov...

[edit on 4-1-2010 by space cadet]

reply to post by space cadet

Hi space cadet! Great to see you again!

You're out Tennessee way, aren't you? Somewhere around there? Okay, we've seen that in the past where you've made reports about what you're picking up, it usually leads to something, so we'll have to keep an eye on things.

By the way I checked that link you gave about the octopuses (octopi??) on the beach, and it seemed to be for something rather different. All the same as I hadn't heard about it I checked on the web and there's a multitude of reports about it. Most strange and apparently quite unexplained.

It's not something I can recall having happened before, mass beachings of (dead) octopuses. Sure is odd.

For those who are interested there is a thread about the octopuses here on ATS and you can get straight to it by clicking here.

Mike


[edit on 4/1/10 by JustMike]