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Could Electron Counts Detect Major Earthquakes?
hcs_$reboot writes "According to a Japanese researcher, the electron count escalation high in the atmosphere could indicate that a major earthquake is going to happen within 30~40 minutes. That phenomenon was observed before three earthquakes since 2004. If confirmed, the earthquake detection system could save thousands of lives."
I have never been in an earthquake, but I have been in numerous tornadoes. Back in the 60's we did not have alarms. Now that we have them, it is useful to be woken at night to head down. The tornado warnings HAS saved a number of lives. I can only imagine that the same would be true of Earthquakes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hopefully it is 100% reliable.
At least in Italy.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
“I think it’s worthwhile to document it like this, to see what will happen with the next event,” Kanamori says, “but I can’t be completely convinced.”
I can't seem to access the paper but can anyone tell me how long of a time range was surveyed and how many times the electron counts spiked when there wasn't a massive earthquake?
Granted, it still could be useful to use as a percentage or forecast if intersecting this statistic with other metrics.
My work here is dung.
TFA says:
Is GPS satellite distribution not uniform-on-average across the globe? Sombody can 'splains?
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That phenomenon was observed before three earthquakes since 2004.
Certainly this opens an argument for more research in this area. However how about actually figuring out if it's not just co-incidence before talking about building "detection systems" and putting numbers to the "lives saved". Otherwise you're going to get all geologists arrested and extradited to Italy to face manslaughter charges.
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Natural earthquakes don't change the atmosphere, HAARP made do. It's interesting to note that Russia reported that they detected this attack against Japan 8 hours before the earthquake struck using their HAARP detection system a few days after it happened.
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Well, for earthquakes near major infrastructure like, say, nuclear reactor, they could initiate a reactor shutdown before the earthquake starts. In places like California with the double-decker freeways, you may be able to get motorists at least off the bridges onto more solid land. You could have trains come to a halt, too. And, you could get emergency personnel paged and at the ready.
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It has been suspected for quite a long time that there may be a detectable piezoelectric effect before major earthquakes caused by the changing stresses in rocks.
Time will tell if this is the much anticipated cause of the effect that the researcher has found.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Not to be overly cynical but 30-40 minutes to brace for a major earthquake? While I see this being helpful I can't see saving thousands of lives - at least not in the immediate future.
Before the SCADA control system drops due to destruction, you can slam all natural gas valves shut. Well, at half an hour, you could darn near depressurize the system... Instantly, no deaths due to fire.
Also its practically impossible to be crushed under a building by an earthquake, if you're outside and "far away" from buildings. Yet another reason it sucks to live in an urban area, but for the rest of us...
Finally its difficult to be crushed under a bridge or trapped in a subway tunnel if they've been evacuated...
I would hazard a guess that you could reduce fatalities by about 75% to 90% with this system... until false alarms make it ignored, etc.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Weather studies have shown that above 80% false positives (i.e. 4 out 5 dont occur), almost everyone ignores warnings. These scientist would need to track electron levels for a large number of recent quakes to see if this is the case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances
Anyone know EM wave physics well? Would the published levels of changing ionospheric charge modify the Schumann resonance enough to allow for remote (global?) detection by watching the ~7Hz wavebands?
Given the electrons show up 30 minutes BEFORE an earthquake, isn't it obvious that earthquakes are caused by electrons in the atmosphere? Case closed.
Clearly this is some James Bond villain's satellite weapon firing electrons at the Earth's crust to cause an earthquake. That's why the electrons show up in the atmosphere first, then the earthquake happens after. I think we need to investigate large construction company CEOs, one of them clearly has a doomsday machine.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
You don't feel an (at least 7.5) earthquake while driving, so unless the coming one is really strong, imho it doesn't make any sense to stop the train.
One way or another, you'd feel differently about driving if they road suddenly wasn't there. Also, I'm sure that even in CA, trains stop asap in an earthquake.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Curiously, the exact same idea has been used to detect (ok, after the fact) nuclear tests. For nuclear tests, the mechanism of the ionosphere disturbance makes a little more sense than for an earthquake.
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I have heard the theories about injecting saltwater into natural gas wells causing minor earthquakes, and the fact that there are no recorded earthquakes form the Marianas trench region, supposedly due to the large amount talc rich mud that acts as a lubricant between the plates. Both of those make sense to me, and that is pretty much the limit of my 'expertise' in plate tectonics; The only way that I could see it being possible is if, somehow they were able to create waves in the magma, and peak the stress near a fault line. It seems to me that it would be far too difficult with our present technology to do. I think it would be very difficult to even create a focused enough broadcast from HAARP to target a specific geographic area. The only way I could see doing this would be with standing waves causing constructive interference only over the target, of which I don't think the array is capable of producing a wide enough range of frequencies (based solely on the antennas' size) The only way I could see them coupling would be through the Earth's magnetic field, and since no one has noticed fluctuations of that in regard to earthquakes, and that the Earth's magnetic field is so weak to begin with, though it is over such a massive area... Also I don't know that EM energy on the Gigawatt scale would be enough to trigger such a massive earthquake, I couldn't rule it out, but I know of no experiments that dealt with it. I think it would be too difficult to do, even assuming HAARP has that effect in the first place. Let alone the list of targets, what would the government gain from it? If anything I would think they would have been opposed to it just because of the negative publicity that GE, and the Japanese government received over it. I don't think they would want to see a military contractor's reputation harmed in such a way, lol!
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It's enough time to clear bridges, multi-level freeways and things like that. Or for people to get out of poorly constructed buildings.
Hmm... Electrons suggest electric current.
I'd toss in the theory that the pre-stresses of an earthquake generate atomic-power level electric currents in the metal ores of the earth's crust. Induction ala the theory that transformers use thus causes electric current to be generated at a certain point in the earth's atmosphere, possibly because it's a good medium for this type of induction.
Just a thought.
Not to be overly cynical but 30-40 minutes to brace for a major earthquake?
Are you kidding? That's enough time to save perhaps 9 out of 10 people in an earthquake. It's more than enough time to evacuate all but the largest buildings. It's more than enough time to get people away from bodies of water and the possibility of tsunami. You can clear bridges and underpasses, anywhere that has an elevated chance of killing people. It's enough time to shut down gas mains and operating tables. You don't need to get people out of the city, you just need to get them out of the more dangerous situations. And just shutting down utilities would greatly reduce the risk of fires.
The problem as I see is a high false positive rate. If there are a lot of false alarms, then people won't respond to a real danger.
However, since you can't exactly evacuate a major city in that time - could a "earthquake shelter" be created?
Middle of a parking lot away from buildings, for example, would be an adequate earthquake shelter. In a dense city, I'd recommend packing people into "green spaces" and other open places away from buildings. Subways and other underground structures shouldn't be too bad either. They are. all else being equal, somewhat more resistant to earthquakes than surface buildings.