Can Earthquakes Be Predicted? (greekreporter.com) 49
A researcher from the Netherlands has gone viral for allegedly predicting the earthquake which struck Turkey and Syria, just three days before two massive quakes affected the region on Monday, February 6. From a report: On Friday, February 3, Frank Hoogerbeets posted on Twitter, "Sooner or later there will be a ~M 7.5 earthquake in this region (South-Central Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon)." The post was accompanied by a map highlighting the area Hoogerbeets expected to be affected by seismic activity. Hoogerbeets works for a research institute called the SSGEOS. The institute's purpose is "monitoring geometry between celestial bodies related to seismic activity." According to the SSGEOS, their monitoring activities are based on evidence that "specific geometry in the Solar System may cause larger earthquakes." On February 2, the SSGEOS posted an earthquake forecast which stated "Larger seismic activity may occur from 4 to 6 February, most likely up to mid or high 6 magnitude. There is a slight possibility of a larger seismic event around 4 February."
The methodology and scientific rationale used by Frank Hoogerbeets and the SSGEOS are not universally accepted. The viral tweet has inspired a debate on Twitter as to the validity of the earthquake prediction. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), for an earthquake prediction to be legitimate, three criteria must be accurately predicted: 1.) the date and time; 2.) the location; and 3.) the magnitude.
"Neither the USGS nor any other scientists have ever predicted a major earthquake," says the USGS. "We do not know how, and we do not expect to know how any time in the foreseeable future."
The methodology and scientific rationale used by Frank Hoogerbeets and the SSGEOS are not universally accepted. The viral tweet has inspired a debate on Twitter as to the validity of the earthquake prediction. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), for an earthquake prediction to be legitimate, three criteria must be accurately predicted: 1.) the date and time; 2.) the location; and 3.) the magnitude.
"Neither the USGS nor any other scientists have ever predicted a major earthquake," says the USGS. "We do not know how, and we do not expect to know how any time in the foreseeable future."
One hit doesn't prove a theory (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not only that, but it wasn't really a hit either. There wasn't any prediction on when. "Sooner or later" is any time at all.
And, for a known earthquake prone area, the rest is an easy guess. How many other guesses have they also thrown in the air?
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Also my first thought. It's like "sooner or later on will hit Tokyo or San Francisco"
but then this was also in the summary: On February 2, the SSGEOS posted an earthquake forecast which stated "Larger seismic activity may occur from 4 to 6 February, most likely up to mid or high 6 magnitude. There is a slight possibility of a larger seismic event around 4 February."
If they don't post something like that every other week, this is impressive enough to have a closer look at.
Anyone up to throw the state of the
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It's kind of funny but I remember several kooks on usenet a long time who would constantly throw out vague, open ended predictions about quakes and other natural disasters. And lo and behold whenever any happened would do their damnedest to shoehorn reality to fit them. They would get flamed mercilessly for being parasitic ghouls trying to profit from disaster.
But it just shows that a prediction in itself means nothing. It has to be specific, evidence based and has some way of quantifying success. Any kook
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I remember - not fondly - both the WeatherLawyer and the several Expanding Earth idiots.
Which is the set of criteria that are attributed to the USGS. (The same criteria were in circulation on Usenet://sci.geo.earthquakes i
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If this is a hit... (Score:3)
Predictions like this are about as useful as predicting that the sun will rise tomorrow.
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Plus, it's after the fact cherry-picking. There's probably at least one nutcase a week predicting an earthquake such that the chance one of the nuts will be correct by shear chance is fairly high. Most of the time the nuts and their nutty predictions are simply quietly ignored because they are wrong.
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Hamsters (Score:3)
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There is no evidence that animals can detect earthquakes. The myth is based on after-the-fact anecdotes.
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six years in prison if you get it wrong (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
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Galileo: Nods sorrowfully
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Informative *and* instructive.
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(It also got rolled back significantly on appeal - I don't think any of them actually did jail time, apart from confinement during trial appearances).
How many false positives? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Sooner or later" (Score:4, Interesting)
And once we are able to quantify "Sooner or later" we'll have the problem licked.
I looked for a past history of predictions from the org and found none. People have claimed for ages that planetary positions have some effect on tiny little Earth. A giant ball of fire with the mass of a million Earths pretty much drive the effects from planets right into the noise floor.
If they do this a couple more times, then it'll be interesting. I'll keep in mind...
Once is happenstance
Twice is coincidence
Thrice is enemy action, er, a trend
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True, but also, the tidal effects of the moon overshadow those from the sun.
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True. And have a much better chance of causing an earthquake. Sooner or later.
@dutchsinse routinely predicts earthquakes (Score:2)
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Watch the https://www.youtube.com/@dutch... [youtube.com] channel. He's been predicting earthquakes for years with amazing accuracy (unlike the scientists who claim it can't be done). He explains exactly how to do it too.
...and even better, he can't livestream on YouTube because those same scientists who claim it can't be done got him restricted because the accuracy of his predictions might "scare" people.
Re:@dutchsinse routinely predicts earthquakes (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm guessing the real reason he can't livestream on YouTube is because he's proven himself to be a disinformation-spewing omni-conspiracy-nut, which is also the only reason he gets the Texas Sharpshooter treatment from other conspiracy nuts on his crazy-ass astrology-based earthquake predictions.
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The problem is that he's not good at predicting them, his fans are good at highlighting any time a real earthquake comes close to matching any one of the baseless earthquake predictions he has been cranking out at least once a week over the past decade.
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Just ran across a great video on this exact topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Occam's razor (Score:2)
Assume this theory of predicting earthquake is correct, it would imply many of the science that you learned in high school and which goes into making everyday scientific products is wrong. Just because, it make one or two predictions which by chance turned out to be true, it does not mean it is actually true.
It is not a big deal for those who don't possess any science knowledge. But for any scientist, the sacrifice of throwing away all known science for this one prediction is too much. That is why you will
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which goes into making everyday scientific products is wrong.
How so? It could only hint that one or two laws are not fully understood, and by no means implies that anything about science you learned is wrong.
Fishy (Score:3)
He does not work for a real research institute. This is a single person effort and an amateur website. He claims on the website he has scanned the next 200 years for suitable planetary configurations within minutes. But why does not he publish the future predictions already? Why does not he publish the backlog from last century and correlation with documented earthquakes? He does not publish equations, code, binary software, statistical studies... nothing. He published some vague text on his website, and those tweets.
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Well he did cleverly respond to someone calling him out that they can't disprove it does NOT have an effect, therefore he is right.
I guess that really is all there is to know here. And people are of course eating it up like crazy.
Re:Fishy (Score:5, Insightful)
Jupiter is the next biggest thing in our solar system, and it's less than one one-thousandth the mass of the Sun. It's also 5 times further away from us, and the inverse square law does the rest.
Magnitude of effect (Score:2)
Yes (Score:3)
Just with rather large error-bars in time and somewhat smaller ones in location. For example, it was entirely clear Turkey would get hit and a lot of people would die because of the utterly corrupt regime and construction companies resulting in a lot of concrete structures that just cannot withstand what needs to be expected there. This time the prediction was a few days before it happened, but it could have been a year or 5 years.
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It is not the people living in the buildings that first replaced sand with more sand and then with trash. In this specific case, a lot of the affected being Kurds, these will probably also not be the morons that voted an academic failure and religiously fanatical cleptocrat into "leading" the country.
Known scam (Score:2)
On a given day there are probably thousands of idiots making a prediction that there will be an Earthquake. At some point one of those broken clocks will be right. No need to elevate a statistically guaranteed outcome to God status.
He broke my BS meter (Score:5, Informative)
The prediction seems impressive but he's always predicting quakes [newsweek.com]:
Indeed, while on the surface timing of the tweet, just days before the quake struck, may seem prescient, Hoogerbeets' and SSGEOS Twitter feeds feature countless similar predictions, many of which did not precede any high-magnitude shocks.
His whole "critical planetary geometry" spiel sounds way more like astrology than science. In fact, I'm pretty sure it is just astrology.
The about page [ssgeos.org] is basically "lets look through big quakes from the past and cherry pick the few with where planets were in some kind of alignment".
And if you're thinking "hmm, it seems plausible that the small gravitational effect of another planet could be the straw that broke the camel's back" take another look at the about page. Some of those "critical planetary geometries" are literally happening on the other side of the sun.
In fact, he's not talking gravity because even he's (probably) capable of doing the math and seeing it's negligible. Instead:
Based on our research, it appears that gravity is not responsible for larger earthquakes at the time of critical planetary and lunar geometry. The most likely force acting on Earth's crust at the time of critical geometry is electromagnetic. This could also explain the lightning in Earth's atmosphere prior to larger earthquakes, which could be the result of atmospheric forcing induced by electromagnetic charge from critical geometry between celestial bodies in the Solar System.
So basically, because the trivially measured force can't be responsible it must be the another force with no plausible explanation for how it happens!!
Oh, but he believes he's on solid scientific ground because of a ridiculous nature letter to the editor from 1959 [twitter.com].
Long story short: Scientific crackpot who regularly predicts quakes that never happen finally had one of his predictions overlap with reality.
Why is the post above tagged as Flamebait? (Score:2)
It should be tagged informative and insightful.
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Concur with dezcar - this should be (Score:5, Informative) or insightful. Somebodies with mod points, score quantaman correctly!
Should be (Score:2)
Concur with the other two blokes here. Why is this rated flamebait?
Get on it mod pointers and fix this travesty!
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You finally got modded up, but I notice that 20% marked you as flamebait. You must be gathering a following like that silverspoon guy.
I predict.. (Score:2)
That Yellowstone super volcano will also go off "soon". The geological record shows that roughly every 725 thousand years it does. We are getting to that point so "soon" the volcano will erupt and we are likely completely screwed. SOON!
I could pull something out of ... (Score:2)
... my ass (thank you, Mulish) and interpret it as an earthquake prediction, and if I do it often enough and focus on places that do have a great deal of strain, faults, and quake activity, I could be right occasionally. Also helps to make the "prediction" full of weasel words so if it doesn't happen, well, fine, and if does, well, great!
USGS is correct. They don't know how to predict earthquakes. They do know how to make forecasts, stated as % chance in n years. There's a big difference between those.
Basic
Planets and earthquakes (Score:2)
OK, let's apply a bit of science here.
Our planet is subject to tidal forces as a result of the gravitational gradients it is subject to. We see them twice a day as the ocean rises and falls. These forces also act upon the bulk of the planet, though the effects are not readily visible. One of the more noticable ones to us is the addition of leap seconds as the earth's rotation slows down very slightly.
The biggest tidal forces result from the moon, these are an order of magnitude larger than any other body. H
Oh Hell, I'm Sorry. (Score:1)
First they mock you, ignore you, then you're right (Score:1)
The late Jim Berkland (who may have predicted the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the1994 Northridge Earthquake) never got any respect for his theory of moon syzygy as a trigger for earthquakes. Nor L. Ostrihansky with his refinement of the theory to include the Length Of Day (LOD) acceleration.
Consider the Sumatra Earthquakes of 1985 and 2004.
The 1985 Sumatra quake occurred on 27-Dec-1985 (magnitude 6.6). The LOD minimum was on 28-Dec-1985. The Moon's declination was 27 deg 32 min. The Sun's declination
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They didn't give any explanation for the rejection of the Ostrihansky paper.
For the Nature article that was published, here's a nice summary.
"The current study will not be the final word on the matter, adds Kao. There are just too many factors that contribute to triggering an earthquake — such as how stress transfers within the ground to cause a geological fault to move — to untangle exactly what role tides might have.
But “the results are plausible”, says John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who helped to debunk some of the more tenuous tide–earthquake claims4. “They’ve done a very careful job.”
The discovery does not affect how societies should prepare for possible earthquakes, says Ide. Even if slightly enhanced by the tides, the probability of a quake happening on any particular day in an earthquake-prone region remains very low. “It’s too small to take some actions,” he says.
I would suspect someone has been applying the latest "AI" statistical techniques to earthquakes vs. all the various phenomena, which might provide more clarity at some point.