From the AGU: An atmospheric precursor to the recent Japan megaquake
Most scientists believe that earthquakes are inherently unpredictable, and reports of various kinds of earthquake precursor signals have been difficult to verify. However, in a new study, Heki reports a possible ionospheric precursor to the devastating 11 March 2011 magnitude 9 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. Analyzing data from the Japanese GPS network, he detects an increase in the total electron content (TEC) in the ionosphere above the focal region of the earthquake beginning about 40 minutes before the quake.
The TEC enhancement reached about 8 percent above the background electron content. The increase in TEC was greatest above the earthquake epicenter and diminished with distance from the epicenter. The researcher also analyzes GPS records from previous earthquakes and finds that similar ionospheric anomalies occurred before the 2010 magnitude 8.8 Chile earthquake, possibly the 2004 Sumatra magnitude 9.2 earthquake, and possibly the 1994 magnitude 8.3 Hokkaido earthquake, but TEC enhancements were not seen before smaller earthquakes.
Although previous studies have shown that earthquakes could trigger atmospheric waves that travel upward and disturb the ionosphere, it is unclear how an ionospheric disturbance could occur before an earthquake begins. In addition, the ionosphere is highly variable, and solar storms can trigger large TEC changes, so nonearthquake causes of any TEC enhancement need to be ruled out. The researcher states that, unlike previously suggested earthquake precursors, the TEC enhancement before the Tohoku quake had obvious spatial and temporal correlation between the quake and precursor signal as well as clear magnitude dependence. Further research is needed to verify that TEC enhancements can indeed be a precursor to large earthquakes.
Source: Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2011GL047908, 2011 http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2011GL047908
Title: Ionospheric electron enhancement preceding the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake
Key Points
- Positive TEC anomaly appears before M9 class events
- The anomaly occurs above the epicenter and lasts ~1 hour
- M9 class earthquakes can be predicted
Kosuke Heki
Department of Natural History Sciences, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
Abstract
The 2011 March 11 Tohoku-Oki earthquake (Mw9.0) caused vast damages to the country. Large events beneath dense observation networks could bring breakthroughs to seismology and geodynamics, and here I report one such finding. The Japanese dense network of Global Positioning System (GPS) detected clear precursory positive anomaly of ionospheric total electron content (TEC) around the focal region. It started ∼40 minutes before the earthquake and reached nearly ten percent of the background TEC. It lasted until atmospheric waves arrived at the ionosphere. Similar preseismic TEC anomalies, with amplitudes dependent on magnitudes, were seen in the 2010 Chile earthquake (Mw8.8), and possibly in the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman (Mw9.2) and the 1994 Hokkaido-Toho-Oki (Mw8.3) earthquakes, but not in smaller earthquakes.
Kevin, when you plan for disasters, you do not plan for everything to go right, you plan for everything to go wrong. Pessimism rules
A reactor scram shuts down the chain reaction, it doesn’t eliminate the need to remove the heat and the pressure that builds up. It just stops a nuclear reaction.
By what definition is an emergency scram an orderly</b? shutdown of a reactor?
So (pretending to be a climate “scientist”) we now have positive confirmation that total electron content causes earthquakes. As electronics is obviously man made, this is clearly yet more proof that mankind is causing earthquakes. Therefore to prevent the catastrophic doomsday earthquake that I am now predicting (just after I retire), the world must invest in total electron content modified circuitry, which drains the evil electronics out, thereby eliminating all the evil electrons that are causing earthquakes … and the fact that I have the patent for all these devices has not in the slightest affected my judgement.
Kevin Cave says:
Feeling somewhat aghast at the “40 minutes too short/useless” comments here.
Ditto.
ggm says:October 4, 2011 at 4:04 am
The answer is incredibly obvious…. just before the big “snap” happens, there will be massive compression/decompression forces on the rocks. That’s where Piezoelectrics generate massive electrical currents throught quartz and other similar Piezoelectric minerals.
I haven’t done the maths, but the thought occurs to me that we might be best to view the atmosphere as a massive capacitor with two plates: earth and ionosphere. The ionosphere is simply responding to the changes on the other plate, suggesting that the earth itself is being massively charged — something which may be difficult to measure “in the capacitor” but very much apparent on the other end?
This concept is discussed on the “Tallbloke” blog last march.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/m-a-vukcevic-earthquakes-and-geomagnetic-storms/
Many graphs and explaination of effects prior to large quakes. pg
Wow guys. The post did not say they could give a 40 minute warning. It said they were able to determine that the “buildup” started 40 minutes beforehand. Best case then is that they might be able to “see” enough to give a 30 minute warning IF they caught it at the beginning of the buildup.
Yeah, that might be better than nothing. But how long does it take to climb down the stairs of say a 30 story building, especially if everyone from all 29 upper floors is using the stairs? What about even taller buildings? And if all that accomplishes is to get everyone out in the street between the canyons of tall buildings…
It would be helpful in areas where folks could get away from tall buildings in very short order. But most places where that would be true don’t have tall buildings. So it could still help in areas with few or no tall buildings.
But that is still assuming they could determine in less than 10 minutes that an earthquake was about to happen.
After the Loma Prieta quake in California in 1989, Stanford University hosted conference to bring together all the observations that might have represented early warnings. Many people were there with business plans and prediction companies in the making.
Two of the most interesting electromagnetic correlations came from first, a Stanford researcher doing work for the Navy on ultra-low frequency (4Hz) communication. His antenna was set up in the hills overlooking the Pacific not far from the epicenter and showed clear disturbances preceding the event. The second was from an amateur scientist who had built a “free power” clock for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, a unique and delightful self-generated science “museum.” It used a simple wire antenna strung outdoors, a rectifier circuit and a quartz digital clock. Along the way he started tracking the antenna output with a strip chart recorder. Low and behold he began seeing “things” in the output. The tides going up and down in the nearby SF Bay. Sunrise and sunset. Then a “huge” anomaly, with many spikes, a day or so before Loma Prieta. His hypothesis was that since granite under high shear stress changes electrical resistance by a large factor, that this would create local “dips” in the overall electromagnetic field close to the surface. The plan was to deploy hundreds of sensors around the Bay Area funded by amateur enthusiasts, using Radio Shack TRS-80 computers that would “phone home” periodically to create a networked “weather map” of electromagnetic anomalies. My, weren’t we advanced for 1989? The trouble was that interest in earthquakes decays exponentially after the event, so the network never happened.
He did initiate a project to instrument the Parkfield Fault, arguably the most instrumented fault in the world, but the “seismograph guys” of the day were about as receptive to electromagnetic theories as today’s AGW folks are of cosmic ray theories. Nothing was ever proven, but it is worth noting that there were also Japanese scientists at the time very much involved in electromagnetic phenomena for many years.
The problem is that there are a number of tantalizing correlational observations, but without a workable theory of causation, nobody really knows where to look – high frequencies or low; near the ground or the ionosphere and as on.
The most entertaining “prediction system” was a packaged investment-ready business plan that had cages of gerbils, I think, with video cameras in the ceiling and software to analyze their movement and see when there were “disturbed.” Talk about a signal to noise problem!
Just a thought, Would an increase in resistance from stess/strain along the fault just before a total failure of drag holding the fault in place create an electro magnetic field like a resistor in an electrical circuit?
Since the earth has a magnetic field, an increase in resistance at a point in the field might act as a generator of electrons. I need to think about this a bit magnetic field interrupted to generate electricity and all that.
John Marshall says:
October 4, 2011 at 2:00 am
Interesting but 40 mins. is far too short a time period to do anything to really help.
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What are some of you smoking??
0 minutes? Or 40 minutes?
If I was a civil defense planner I would take 15 minutes or even 10 minutes over 0. But 40? Are you f-ing kidding me.
Will take 40 minutes all day long.
That could have saved many thousands of lives.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Studying the data here leads me to an estimate that these researchers did a very good job. There appears to be a clear signal underlying the major noise. If Ol’Sol were not such a major factor in spewing electrical noise into our atmosphere, this relationship would undoubtedly have been detected much earlier and given credence. Unfortunately, due to that noise, this knowledge of a TEC precursor (assuming this research passes scrutiny) may be just as hard to put into useful warning system as it is to harness controlled nuclear fusion.
“Pessimism rules”?
I’ll go for rational thought over your pessimism any time.
{self-snip a rant – can’t be bothered with you any more and it’s 0042hrs and I’m going to bed anyway – laters}
Nice to see some consideration of new data here. There seems to be something electromagnetic going on before earthquakes that is at times detectable. Sporadic reports of animal behavior changes before quakes are one possible data point. If true, they are reacting to something. Another is a thing called earthquake light(s), which shows up before / during a quake at times. URL on the phenomena here: http://geology.about.com/od/earthquakes/a/EQlights.htm This leads some to suggest a piezoelectric power source.
Only personal experience with EM and a quake took place here in Anchorage in the mid-1990s. A 5.8 hit in the middle of the night. Epicenter was about 15 miles from the house. Something woke my lady and I up a second or two before the ground started shaking. It sounded liked a loud crack. There were other reports in town that were mostly ignored. We can normally feel the arrival of the various waves depending on where we sit relative to the plane of rupture.
Something appears to be going on. Unfortunately it does not appear to happen all the time. And there is far too little data to predict anything or even posit a theory. More data. More data. Cheers –
P.G. Also: http://daltonsminima.altervista.org/?p=16188
Which law of Faraday is this?
(IOW, this is not exactly ‘unexplored science’, we’ve had a lot of theoretical and experimental work in this area in the last 150 some odd years).
PS. A change in magnetic field flux density due to a change in the ‘resistance’ of the medium would be a change in permittivity. (technically speaking) just sayin …
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Not operative.
While working throughout the day I routinely have a LW (longwave) receiver on (besides perhaps a receiver on 80 thru 10 Meters, 2M and even UHF) and tuned to an empty portion of that band (as time goes on more and more LW maritime and Aviation beacons are decommissioned this is easier to do) receiving pops and crackles generated usually atmospheric processes e.g. the ubiquitous thunderstorm experienced here in the lower end of ‘Tornado Alley’ but also man-made noises (such as when Fluorescent lamps are turned on and the cathodes are still cool, tube pressures low and they create a few minutes noise) … were something of an ‘unknown’ nature to spring up, a video and sound ‘camera’ would be brought to bear on the subject .. next step would be to get a directional bearing established on the source (easy to do with a ferrite loopstick at LW frequencies) …
Yes, there are ppl ‘listening’. Note also the number of SWL boards springing up as the internet has evolved, there isn’t the dearth of monitoring activity a layman might otherwise assume (‘absence or proof is not proof of absence’ works a number of ways) …
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Ever tried creeping up the stairs stealthily in an old wooden frame structure? Nigh unto impossible given the creaking noises that emanate from every dried old joint that sees the least little bit of flexure with body weight exerted through a foot … extending that a bit, it would not take a lot of movement, but a fair bit of ‘force’ on a structure to induce pent-up tension (or compression) in a structure to release, given the right combination of factors … perhaps a slow precursor ‘roll’ in the quake caused something in the house to go ‘snap’?
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What I can’t even mention HXXXP? I didn’t say I believe it (I don’t); I was just mentioning how some people will interpret this news.
[ Reply: It’s explained in the site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
Just curious what you have in mind as ‘noise’ produced by ol’ Sol?
Granted, tropospheric events like T-storms contribute there part on frequencies at/below 4 to 8 MHz, but above that we can still experience situations where ‘device noise’ inherent in pre-amplifiers (ostensibly the ‘low noise’ ) override the so-called terrestrial noise …
Heck, even ‘terrestrial noise’ from the planet Jupiter can be heard, so noise produced by old Sol isn’t so overriding that it is ‘obscuring’:
http://www.radiosky.com/rjcentral.html
Also note my mention of “ionosonde” above, these might show more promise in deducing what is happening at the ionospheric level than simply relying on some nebulous low-level emanation from that same level … a paper awaits for anyone wishing to explore that aspect …
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The gentleman might have been receiving what are termed ‘whistlers’ in that frequency range:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast19jan_1/
Excerpt fropm that webpage above:
More info – web search on whistlers.
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Not a single snark comment on HAARP phenomena, with the bonus of Ionosphere heating?
Buy a dog and teach it to talk. They could let you know in advance of many happenings. They know a great deal in advance of natural phenominae, they just can’t tell us any specifics with their limited communication abilities.
Piers Corbyn from weatheraction claims to be able to predict grand euarthquaks to some extent.
In his words it is the influx of particles from the sun that cause earthquake. The particles apparently come from can allen belt and then hit earth and cause earthquakes.
NExt mys speculation: IT particles, let say electrons hit ionosphere, they would set it vibration, causing resonation and low frequency radio waves that are detected by animals.
– Also, electron influx would be high resulting in increase in electron content of atmosphere.
– but what could set off the earthquake? Low frequency radiowaves?, electrical currents running trhu ground surface to magma bubbles?, some kind of magnetic reliefes to ground that free the locks hindering the builf up on tension? any suggestions?
For those who don’t think 40 minutes warning is meaningful, consider how many tens of thousands of people would not have died in the 2008 Sichuan and 2010 Haiti Earthquakes. The vast majority died in buildings of shoddy construction that collapsed on them. 40 minutes or 4 minutes would have made a huge difference to them.
@Kevin Cave
In sparsely populated areas, 40 minutes warning of a major earthquake would be a boon. In densely populated areas, 40 minutes warning of a major earthquake would likely be a disaster even if no earthquake happened.
As soon as the warning went out all cell phone coverage would fail due to overuse. The movement of people to safe areas would be problematical due to sheer numbers involved and there would undoubtedly be some who would not simply go to a safe area but have some other object in mind which they think they would have time to do: eg meet up with a loved one or go home or to school where children are located. Even if vehicle use was banned there would undoubtedly be many who would ignore the ban clogging up streets. It would be very difficult indeed to control what happened during the 40 minute warning unless the populace was well trained and inclined to follow instructions.