Story from AFP via Breitbart, h/t to Leif Svalgaard. Maybe the Chinese had it right way back then with this gadget:
For ages, mankind has craved a tool that can provide early warning of that terrifying moment when the earth begins to shake.
But if a scientific paper published on Wednesday is confirmed, we may at last have found one.
The best hope yet of an earthquake predictor could lie in a small, brown, knobbly amphibian, it suggests.
The male common toad (Bufo bufo) gave five days’ warning of the earthquake that ravaged the town of L’Aquila in central Italy on April 6, 2009, killing more than 300 people and displacing 40,000 others, the study says.
Biologist Rachel Grant of Britain’s Open University embarked on a toad-monitoring project at San Ruffino lake, 74 kilometres (46 miles) north of L’Aquila, 10 days before the 6.3-magnitude quake struck.
Her two-person team observed the site for 29 days, counting toad numbers and measuring temperature, humidity, wind speed, rainfall and other conditions.
By March 28, more than 90 male toads had mustered for the spawning season, but two days later, their numbers suddenly fell, Grant reports.
By April 1 — five days before the quake — 96 percent of the males had fled.
Several dozen ventured back on April 9 for the full moon, a known courtship period for toads, although the tally was some 50-80 percent fewer than in previous years.
After this small peak, the numbers fell once more, only picking up significantly on April 15, two days after the last major aftershock, defined as 4.5 magnitude or higher.
In addition, the number of paired toads at the breeding site also dropped to zero three days before the quake. And no fresh spawn was found at the site from April 6 until the last big after-tremor.
Grant says the toads’ comportment is a “dramatic change” for the species.
Once male toads hole up at a breeding site, they usually never leave until the annual spawning season is over, she notes.
Eager to answer the riddle, Grant obtained Russian measurements of electrical activity in the ionosphere, the uppermost electromagnetic layer in the atmosphere, which were picked up by very low frequency (VLF) radio receivers.
The toads’ two periods of exodus both coincided with bursts of VLF disruption.
Read the entire article at Breitbart
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The frogs that live in my garden pond exhibit this behaviour every year.
They emerge from hibernation when the weather is warm enough and for two to three weeks there is much frantic and noisy activity while spawning takes place. Then almost overnight the frogs disappear, I guess back into their hibernating locations. They re-emerge when the weather has warmed a bit more, presumably enough to support the appearance of their food source. Here in the UK where the falling of a chimney pot due to an earth quake is national news, I have never observed this activity coinciding with any earthquake. I suspect that were my pond to be in Italy I could publish an article about this phenomenon and the frogs’ earthquake predicting abilities – if I could get a grant.
New Zealanders on their ‘Shaky Isles’ live with earthquakes and only idiots take them lightly. Most of us have experienced the strange hush from the entire usually-audible animal world in the few minutes before the earth begins to bump/shake/undulate. I always put it down to animals having better hearing and they could hear the rumble before we could.
Pls describe the method of charge build-up (charge separation);is it triboelectric effect (glass-rod cat’s fur effect) or piezoelectric (physical flexure of a crystalline structure)?
Considering the surface/most of the earth is conductive (albeit poor, in some locales), how does this ‘charge’ sustain itself without bleeding off (leaking away) or constant sourcing (re-charging) of same?
How is a surface charge’ transferred to the ionosphere through a substantially non-conductive troposphere?
Refs:
Triboelectrric effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboelectric_effect
Piezo electric effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectricity
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There are MORE than enough clues already posted …
AND it wasn’t worry; you weren’t in the pilot’s seat (sitting behind my keyboard) when posts simply disappeared down the rabbit hole in complete contradiction to normal, expected client-server behavior when making a post on Anthony’s site …
Gary Hladik (14:46:59) : Wish you “sweet dreams”, Oh no, I meant “Sweet Doubts”, peripathetic doubts: Mark a point on the ground then go round and round and round walking and doubting at the same time..Hope some time you stop doubting to go somewhere else.
Gary Hladik (14:46:59) :I am now sure you have no doubts of your doubts and that, by your principles, it is not scientific, so you are making me doubt about it. 🙂
Smoking toad-slightly OT. A guy in my hometown had a huge pet bullfrog that he somehow had taught it to smoke cigarettes. He actually puffed on them. Very intellectual looking frog with that smoke in his mouth. I don’t think he could predict anything though.