http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=36uyr9nx&keywords=earthquake#destReturn to news story archive 21 December 2005
Electric Earthquakes
Civilization's interest in predicting the location and time of damaging earthquakes is clear. The potential for devastation of property that otherwise could be secured, and the loss of life that otherwise could be prevented, are powerful reasons to find predictive factors.
Some scientists have become aware of a correlation between sunspots and Earthquakes and want to use the sunspot data to help predict earthquakes. The theory is that an intensification of the magnetic field can cause changes in the geosphere. The NASA and the European Geosciences Union have already put their stamp of approval on the sunspot hypothesis, which suggests that certain changes in the sun-earth environment affects the magnetic field of the earth that can trigger earthquakes in areas prone to it. It is not clear how such a trigger might work.
In the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 37–71, 2003, there is an excellent report that addresses the more down-to-earth problems facing geophysicists trying to understand earthquakes. The paper is titled, Rocks That Crackle and Sparkle and Glow: Strange Pre-Earthquake Phenomena, by Dr. Friedemann T. Freund, a professor in the Department of Physics, San Jose State University, and a senior researcher at NASA Ames Research Center. Dr. Freund writes, "Many strange phenomena precede large earthquakes. Some of them have been reported for centuries, even millennia. The list is long and diverse: bulging of the Earth's surface, changing well water levels, ground-hugging fog, low frequency electromagnetic emission, earthquake lights from ridges and mountain tops, magnetic field anomalies up to 0.5% of the Earth's dipole field, temperature anomalies by several degrees over wide areas as seen in satellite images, changes in the plasma density of the ionosphere, and strange animal behavior. Because it seems nearly impossible to imagine that such diverse phenomena could have a common physical cause, there is great confusion and even greater controversy."
Freund outlines the basic problem, "Based on the reported laboratory results of electrical measurements, no mechanism seemed to exist that could account for the generation of those large currents in the Earth's crust, which are needed to explain the strong EM signals and magnetic anomalies that have been documented before some earthquakes. Unfortunately, when a set of observations cannot be explained within the framework of existing knowledge, the tendency is not to believe the observation. Therefore, a general malaise has taken root in the geophysical community when it comes to the many reported non-seismic and non-geodesic pre-earthquake phenomena. There seems to be no bona fide physical process by which electric currents of sufficient magnitude could be generated in crustal rocks."
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