That's not a prediction that can be evaluated. For example, I could say "there will be a 7+ magnitude quake somewhere in the Pacific Rim tomorrow" and if I publish the same prediction every day it won't be long until my prediction is true. I might even be right the very first time.
A real prediction should include exact time period, magnitude, and geographic area. And every prediction made must be documented. This lets you do two things: first it lets you clearly decide which predictions came true. Second, we can look at historic probabilities for the predicted quake and evaluate the chances of blind guessing being correct for that exact set of predictions.
In this particular instance, if you look at the predictions made on his twitter stream you'll find that he's clearly a quack who predicts stuff constantly. Not super surprising he got one right. EDIT: Also... surprise! There was a foreshock a couple of hours before he made the prediction.
Look at his youtube and Twitter for 5 minutes, he draws "bands" all over the world predicting nonsense everyday, and probably has a positive prediction rate of 0.5% and he bases everything on some nonsense call "Atmospheric Fluctuations"?
> He is probably more knowledgeable than the average person and has access to latest data on earthquakes.
The person in question's area of "expertise" is claiming that when planets line up to form geometric shapes (e.g. when earth, uranus, and neptune form approximately an equilateral triangle) that this somehow affects seismic activity on our planet. The claim isn't that it's closeness of celestial objects causing this effect, mind you, it's the fact that the planets, however distant, happen to be in a configuration that resembles a geometric primitive.
It sets off a lot of my woo detectors. Here's their website: https://ssgeos.org/
- Enough data that the correlation becomes strong enough.
- The physics community chimes in? I mean the effect could only be due to gravity unless there is another mechanism we don't understand. But given how small the earth is, and how big other planets are, I'd suspect the physics people to see this effect somewhere else?
No, absolutely not - gravity is an inverse distance squared force.
The sun dominates our gravity environment and planets at those distances have negligible effects (really effectively zero) certainly not seismic size perturbations!
The gravitational force from the other planets does slightly affect the Earth's orbit, but the gravitational pull from the other planets and the Moon is still very small. The gravitational pull of the Moon on the Earth is only 0.55% of the gravitational force between the Sun and the Earth, other planets even less than that. Unlikely, very unlikely to trigger earthquakes!
> The gravitational pull of the Moon on the Earth is only 0.55% of the gravitational force between the Sun and the Earth, other planets even less than that. Unlikely, very unlikely to trigger earthquakes!
Playing the devil's advocate, but doesn't Moon affect the movement of water on Earth (i.e. low-high tide) and these are massive movements of mass which could potentially trigger an earthquake?
But isn’t this earthquake microscopic in the scale of the earth?
But I get your point. The sun should be responsible for most of these earthquakes (if gravity was to play a role) unless its gravitational field is prefectly uniform.
I better give up on this because my understanding of gravity and general relativity is based on youtube videos.
> - The physics community chimes in? I mean the effect could only be due to gravity unless there is another mechanism we don't understand. But given how small the earth is, and how big other planets are, I'd suspect the physics people to see this effect somewhere else?
To be totally honest, we don't actually know what specifically causes earthquakes. That is to say, we understand that earthquakes are essentially the sudden, violent release of stress due to crustal deformation, but we don't have great ideas for understanding what causes the stress to be released so violently. As a result, even basic tasks like earthquake forecasting or merely distinguishing a mainshock from a foreshock (before the mainshock occurs) have turned out to be miserable failures.
But as for planetary orientations having an effect via gravity... well, let me put it in perspective. To exert the same gravitational pull on an object on Earth as Jupiter does, the average human being would have to stand does math 15cm away.
> if you look at the predictions made on his twitter stream
The way to do this is to make the same prediction every day, and then delete the tweet when the prediction ends up not coming true. That way, when someone goes and looks at your profile, you'll have a 100% track record. (Or probably better, just a prediction mixed in with random pictures from your dog walks.)
You're missing one important thing: confidence level. You can probably make a 7+ magnitude prediction every day as long as your confidence in it is -- I guess, not knowing much about the Pacific Rim -- less than 1 %.
It's the 10 %, 20 %, 50 % confidence level predictions you have to be a bit more sparing with!
Are some of you scientists? I was searching for how trustable this person is. This man claimed to be a scientist have catched attention of many Turkish twitter user and they've started to fallowing him. And some news sites shared this man as a Dutch scientist who predicted earthquake 2 days ago. Like there isn't enough misinformation about earthquakes.
Also if you click through to to the organization he works for (not linking; no google juice for them), they're clearly quacks: they seem to believe that geometric shapes made by various planets in the solar system can be used to predict earthquakes. Note that they aren't even talking about gravitational effects (which are near zero, anyway), just the specific shapes. Complete nonsense.
Not debating whether this guy is a quack, but it's worth noting that there have been studies showing a strong correlation between accidents and the lunar cycle:
There are also studies suggesting that lunar cycles causes behaviour changes in humans, which could explain that. This doesn't seem that unreasonable given that the lunar cycle has been shown to affect the behaviour of animals and insects:
You're on to something here. I followed some information from the SSGeos website and found that they appear to use work done by a guy who is revered among astrologers, John H Nelson. I had never heard of the guy but it looks like he is a big cheese of early 20th century astrology believers who liked his studies on the effects on short-wave radio propagation under the influence of planetary alignments.
I think this is another case of a blind squirrel finding a nut. It's bound to happen once in a while.
Indeed. He'd have had more respect (and less suspicion) if he's tweet was something like: foreshake detected at xx,yy location, given the nature of the location, high probability of an earthquake of 7.5M.
He's fishing for attention from the general public.
Even if he said that, it'd be nonsense. Foreshocks usually do not precede larger earthquakes (https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-you-predict-earthquakes). Yes, sometimes they do, but it's uncommon. If every time you see foreshocks you predict a larger earthquake, sure, you'll very very occasionally be right. But you haven't done anything useful with your predictions.
(Note that I wouldn't be surprised if this is the kind of person who makes tons of predictions on Twitter, and then deletes the tweets when they turn out to be incorrect, leaving only the correct ones.)
Agreed, but it is specific enough to at least see if he can do it again, once = random, twice = coincidence but the chances of doing this twice are pretty remote.
What's exactly specific? I'm not an expert in Geology but my understanding is that these hot spots are largely known. The outlier prediction will be for a location of an earthquake outside these hot spots. Here is a random map I found on the internet but I think matches a few ones I've seen before: https://broadview.sacredsf.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Ma...
Heh, that map shows the west coast of the US as completely covered. I assure you that we don't have daily earthquakes that are even noticeable, let alone destructive. I live in an area covered by orange circles, and have for nearly 20 years, and I've never felt a M7+ earthquake. The ones I usually do feel are no more than M4.5 or so, and happen at most a few times a year.
My point is that it doesn't really matter if you "predict" an earthquake inside or outside these hot spots: you will nearly always be wrong. And when you are right, it will be due to luck.
Years ago I made an observation that an earthquake would happen based on a near earth object. It ended up being the one in Chile. I do wonder if there's some kind of correlation considering that green comet is flying by
The sun completely dominates all other bodies in the solar system when it comes to gravitational effects on Earth (even the moon has less of an effect than the sun, despite its proximity). The Earth doesn't even notice this comet's existence, gravitationally speaking.
The Gradient between the gravitational forces on different parts of the earth is larger for the moon though, as you can see by the tides. I would assume this would have a bigger effect than the total force. But you are right, a comet or asteroid isn’t going to do anything.
The one doesn't rule out the other. If they can do this again it would be great news in a way because any kind of reliable indicator of an imminent earthquake would save many lives.
A real prediction should include exact time period, magnitude, and geographic area. And every prediction made must be documented. This lets you do two things: first it lets you clearly decide which predictions came true. Second, we can look at historic probabilities for the predicted quake and evaluate the chances of blind guessing being correct for that exact set of predictions.
In this particular instance, if you look at the predictions made on his twitter stream you'll find that he's clearly a quack who predicts stuff constantly. Not super surprising he got one right. EDIT: Also... surprise! There was a foreshock a couple of hours before he made the prediction.