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Using Toads to Predict Earthquakes
ClockEndGooner writes "The BBC is reporting that a team led by Dr. Friedemann Freund from NASA and Dr. Rachel Grant from the UK's Open University have found that 'animals may sense chemical changes in groundwater that occur when an earthquake is about to strike.' Just prior to the quake that struck L'Aquila, Italy in 2009, Grant observed a mass toad exodus from a colony she was monitoring as part of her PhD project, and her published results prompted NASA to contact her as they found that highly stressed tectonic plates released a greater amount of positively charged ions that affected the water quality, which was sensed by the toads. According to NASA's Freund, 'Once we understand how all of these signals are connected, if we see four of five signals all pointing in [the same] direction, we can say, "ok, something is about to happen."'"
Years ago when I was a young lad back on the toad farm (4000 head) I recall the sensitivity the toads had to various climatic and environmental changes. I would go into the barn where about 1000 of our toads where housed at any one time, it could be a sunny day with a clear blue sky, and the toads would be twitching, bumping into each other and whatnot. Sometimes it would get really scary as I feared for my safety from their bucking and random jaunting. But anyway, it seemed they would start reacting to storms way before any human could even sense them. After a while you learned to read the toads and know what was coming.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Every year there's this cacophony of frog croaks from the frogs that inhabit the rice fields surrounding my house, and I've noticed they go very quiet, a few seconds or just before a quake strikes.
The pheasants, on the other hand, are useless - they only start just after the quake has begun.
I live in Japan, and it has long been an old-wife's tale here that Toads and frogs will go quiet and disappear before big earth quakes. And that has been documented to happen in connection with the 3/11 earth quake. Some scientists have suggested that large amounts of Radon is released when pressure builds up before a quake, and that the toads are able to detect this. Another old-wifes tale is that eels also are able to predict earth quakes ( I have yet to understand exactly how they then communicate this to humans) And lastly there were many news articles connecting the fore and after shocks of 3/11 to group dolphin stranding on the affected coasts. There are also stories about wells in Japanese Temples, that are usually murky but turns clear before major earth quakes. Finally it is also said here that temperatures ( or perceived temperature) raise before a quake. All though I have actually found this to be true on several occasions I still believe it is coincidental (or maybe due to selective memory processes).
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
Seismology Ph.D. student, here. Bear with me here as I don't recall the sources for this but if you do enough Googling, I'm sure you can find them. I wrote a paper on the history of Japanese seismology for my undergrad senior project (included some information from Japanese textbooks that might not be available in English), so I've read a lot of about this subject.
People have noticed phenomena such as bizarre animal behavior, earthquake lights, and earthquake clouds since the dawn of time, and more recently people have noticed an increased charge in the ionosphere before earthquakes. A NASA scientist has also shown that a spike in electric current will run through a rock moments before the rock fractures.
Much research has been done by Chinese and Japanese regarding animals. Japanese believed for hundreds of years that earthquakes were caused by catfish. They based this on much historical evidence of catfish going crazy shortly before an earthquake. At one time in Japanese history, "catfish" and "earthquake" were used as interchangeable words. There were lots of science experiments and observations done regarding catfish in the early 1900s at a lab in Aomori prefecture. A famous early Japanese seismologist (his name escapes me) found an incontrovertible correlation between oarfish catches and some seismic swarm in the 1960s. There was an earthquake in Hokkaido a few decades ago that was foreshadowed by all of the mice on the island running amok in the streets. It is common folk knowledge that when deep sea fish appear near the surface en masse, a large earthquake will strike soon.
I don't know as much about Chinese seismological history, but it's commonly believed and has been shown that snakes can detect earthquakes. There have been studies and anecdotal evidence in Chinese seismology of snakes that will awake from hibernation before an earthquake. My Taiwanese adviser claimed that the Chinese scientists determined that sulfur gasses produced similar behavior in hibernating snakes. I also should note that China is the only place in the world where there is a government mandate to study earthquake prediction, event if it's fruitless. Every seismological bureau in China (there is one in every province) must look into earthquake prediction. There is a stigma about earthquake prediction and looking at animal behavior in the West, but that stigma is much less severe in Asia, especially China.
In addition to Asia, every time there's a major earthquake in the Western world, I see stories like this, like "I'm a biologist and my frogs went berserk the day leading up to the earthquake," or "I'm a zoologist and my alligators did weird things before the earthquake." There is clearly some link between animal behavior and earthquakes that has been shown repeatedly throughout history.
Lastly, it wasn't but a year ago I saw posters at a seismology meeting about huge spikes in ionosphere charge before large earthquakes. This has been shown repeatedly to happen all over the world.
Now for the bad news. This past Seismological Society of America meeting, I saw a poster from NASA research debunking a specific ionosphere charge before a large earthquake result. There are many large earthquakes that are preceded by a huge spike in ionosphere charge. The problem is that there are many, many other times where there are equally, if not more severe spikes in ionosphere charge. The ionosphere likes to have charge spikes relatively frequently. How can you tell the difference between a normal day with a high ionosphere charge and the day before an earthquake? Well, you can't. At least we cant, yet.
The NASA scientist that has shown electrical current running through rocks the moment before a fracture is also very controversial. His results are extremely promising for seismology. The problem is that we've never been able to observe an increased charge in the ground or a change in resistivity before an earthquake. Look up Parkfield, CA. That place is loaded with instruments for earthquake pr