This guy somehow predicted it? https://twitter.com/hogrbe/status/1621479563720118273?t=uZuu...
Lucky or good?
Lucky or good?
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.
> EDIT: Also... surprise! There was a foreshock a couple of hours before he made the prediction.
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?
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!
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.
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?
One would also expect this effect to be a function of distance, not of how prettily lined-up the planets are or the shapes they make when viewed from above.
My claim isn't that it's unlikely that any celestial body can affect earthquake likelihood. It's that it's unlikely that earthquake likelihood is affected by pretty geometry of planet arrangements that do not include our own.
For example, on the "About" page of their website, they show this image:
https://ssgeos.org/images/planets/1960/1960-05-21.jpg
They go on to make the claim that earthquakes were more likely on Earth, because if you draw a line from Venus to Neptune, and another line from Mars to Uranus, those lines cross at right angles.
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.
It's the 10 %, 20 %, 50 % confidence level predictions you have to be a bit more sparing with!
And I forgot to mention this isn't my idea at all. This framing of what is a prediction was invented at USGS. Mea Culpa.
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.)
Quacks like a duck.
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.
I would bet that he got extremely lucky with his timing.
I think this is another case of a blind squirrel finding a nut. It's bound to happen once in a while.
He's fishing for attention from the general public.
Animated map: All earthquakes, 15 years, Jan 1, 2001 - Dec 31, 2015
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.
(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.)
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.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7954673/
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:
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/do-full-moons-an...
Register every day post a tweet about an earthquake tomorrow. If you're wrong, delete it. When you're right, you seem prophetic.