Tracking animals from space could predict earthquakes on the ground | Hacker News Reader

Tracking animals from space could predict earthquakes on the ground

nbcnews.com

61 pointsjonbaer19 comments

It is faszinating and funny that we haven't figured out how animals sense upcoming earthquakes and cannot reproduce that, but modern technology might give us the ability to observe animals well enough to get the earthquake warnings from them.

On the other side, if this works out, there is a good chance to use the gained observation data to make progress in u nderstanding the animals capabilites and behavior.

Makes me wonder if humans also used to have a similar ability/sense, but just lost it over time.

Maybe it's still there but our hyper-conscious nature just drowns out such subconscious/instinctual signals?

Be fair, though. Individual animals are likely terrible at predicting stuff like this. In aggregate, they are probably ok. Not perfect, mind. Just ok.

It isn't like animals don't have a history of also getting killed in earthquakes or other natural disasters.

Earthquake "prediction" is an attractive prospect though widely accepted to be impossible (barring some neutrino/quantum/more-advanced/$ geophysics). "Forecasting" is the more apt term. At any rate, this and other articles are stirring up buzz using just one of many products coming from this experiment, and IMO the least exciting simply because of how unlikely success will be.

ICARUS will primarily help us understand

• "the ontogeny of behavioral and movement traits of animals in the wild, and

• the selection acting on individuals in the wild (i.e., where, why and when do individuals die)"

What are these animals sensing prior to earthquakes? Hyperlocal changes in the earth's magnetic field?

I suspect if we knew we'd just measure it ourselves rather than measuring animal movement from space?

That's why a lot of people (quoted in the article) are appropriately skeptical. Unless animals (but not humans, it would seem) are sensing some real physical effect that could be measured independently, it's unlikely there is anything to this.

And then presumably we could make a machine that's a more accurate and sensitive detector - if there is really something to it.

It could be a form of infrasound, and maybe in a pattern which isn't readily detected by seismographs.

That would be my (completely unsubstantiated) guess as well. Animals, including humans, are surprisingly sensitive to infrasound, but there hasn't been a ton of research on the subject so far.

Seismometers have precision on the order of ppb. Considering that there is no acoustic energy released prior to an earthquake, an infrasound precursor is extremely unlikely and something that seismologists would have already characterized.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5615297/

This study says earthquake precursor movements send signals into the ionosphere, that cause other signals to propagate to earth, which can make objects vibrate audibly, minutes or possibly hours before the main shock. It argues this may be what animals are hearing. Rube Goldberg if true.

Which is the reason why I said "a pattern" not readily recognized.

The condition detected by the animal would not be a specific signal strength or frequency, but rather a more complicated pattern.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/animal_eqs.php

Not going to happen. Heart rates (and all other parameters) vary for all sorts of reasons. To detect a change in these parameters in a period of hours, you'd have to have a really large number of animals. You can just picture an army of humans tagging and replacing Millions of tags on all sorts of animals all around the world.

But maybe on cattle? Telemetry from livestock is either a thing now, or will be in the near future. Doesn't seem like much of a stretch to use that data for all sorts of purposes.

Totally possible. I doubt it will ultimately work, because it will be hard to have enough tagged cattle in proximity to enough actual earthquakes. But it would give an answer to the question what behavioral parameters might change before earth quakes.

It's still possible this is just an illusion.

why not go at the source of the signal?

That is almost certainly the end goal. But, if we already knew the signal, there wouldn't be a story here.

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