The Future of Earthquakes

which is earthquakes. We after we did our super volcano episode, we received a couple of messages, one from Jacob via Twitter and one from Matt via Facebook, who both wrote in to request an episode about another big disaster, earthquakes. Yeah, and not just about what earthquakes are and how they work, of course, but seeing as this is Forward Thinking, what are we going to do about them in the future?

Will we ever be able to predict earthquakes and understand what causes them, when and where they're going to happen, and how to stop them and protect against them? Oh? Sure? And especially that protect protect against them thing, because even if we can't predict them, how can we prepare ourselves better for them? Sure? And I'm sure One of the reasons people want to know about earthquakes right around now is the grand trailer for this movie that's out this

summer called San Andreas. Yeah. Yeah, that came out on May nine. I believe it features the rock right. It's not a grand theft auto movie. It is a movie about a big earthquake, in the tradition of other movies about big disasters where stuff falls over. Yeah, lots of stuff falls over, as it turns out. I have not seen this movie. I'm probably not going to, but I gotta be honest. I saw the trailer when I was in the theater watching Mad Max Fury Road, and it

was hilarious. I I have to say that I laughed through that entire trailer, and I'm not I feel I felt kind of bad out it at the time because although I knew that those digital people were fine, like, like, no digital people were harmed in the making of those

digital effects shots. Earthquakes are very serious matters, of course, right there are terrifying and unpredictable attack upon our placid urban lives and and a lot of times they seem to come out of nowhere and they can kill thousands of people, and so of course earthquakes are worth understanding to figure out, not just for the pure science of it, but to save lives. Oh of course. Yeah. And and the thing, of course about the ground that we stand

on is that it is not solid at all. Well, I mean, i'd say it is solid, but it's not. It's not what stationary should we yes, and not just in the way that that planet Earth is like a spaceship, uh, that the ground is always moving. Earth's crust is made up of continent sized slabs of rock called tectonic plates, which are constantly moving and rubbing up again to each other, pushing over under one another, or moving slightly apart. And

that's fine, that's great, that's I don't know if that's fine. Yeah, it's fine. Well, it's normally on a day to day basis, it's usually fine. Um. But sometimes those those edges, those faults can crack or slip against each other abruptly, causing these very powerful vibrations to shake the edges of those plates in in patterns radiating outward from the point of that slippery origin. Um. And those vibrations a k a.

Seismic waves are what we feel as earthquakes. Yeah, I was trying to think of a good analogy for how earthquakes are created in a at a scale that we can experiment with. And I think this sort of works.

If you put on some rubber soled shoes and then try to walk along on say like a hardwood floor or like a basketball gym floor, without lifting your feet, just scooting your shoes along, well, you'll probably notice if or shoe scooting experiences anything like mine, is that for a certain length of the slide, the shoe will move kind of smoothly, but every now and then it will

sort of get caught for a second. The forward momentum will briefly pause, and then you'll experience a sort of sudden jolt forward, sometimes accompanied by the classic vibratory sounds of scooting, scoot, And these vibrations you can think of as being kind of analogous to what's happening when these plates are scooting against each other. Sure, and and researchers think that it's a it's a build up of potential energy over periods of time that are not, to our

knowledge predictable yet. Um, but we'll address that question later in this episode. Yes, yes, but but earthquakes happen constantly. Oh yeah, yeah. The U S Geological Survey estimates that as many as one point three million earthquakes happen every year. And that's just the ones that are over a two point oh on the Richter scale, which is the point

at which human can feel them. Right, And then it's not even just the primary effects of the vibration of the ground of the earthquake, right, Earthquakes have lots of

secondary causes that can become disasters on their own. Oh, of course, there's a tsunami, and avalanches and landslides and liquification, which is a thing where solid ground starts acting like a liquid which uh, and and flooding and you know, the collapse of human made structures and the lack of resources and the aftermath that ensues and all of these terrible things. Of course. Yeah, So we have very good reason to want to understand how earthquakes work and what

we can do about them. So so I figured we should start by going back a little bit and looking at how our understanding of earthquakes developed over time. Yeah, yeah, what, I bet people had some interesting ideas about earthquakes and ancient times. Well, you'd be right. So the ancient world, of course, experienced plenty of earthquakes, just as many earthqua wakes as we do today, and without the scientific framework to explain them, they came up with some pretty weird

and sometimes funny explanations. So religious spiritual magical explanations were extremely common all over the world West and the East. People sort of explained earthquakes as often as divine punishments or divine im portents. Gods were either like giving a warning or were angry and issuing punishment. I found this one funny example of both the magical explanations given by

the ancients and some of the practical explanations. And these are chronicled in the writings of the Roman historian Ombianus Marcellinus, who is a soldier by trade, and he lived during the fourth century CE, and he wrote a surviving history at the time, and and he he has a little discourse on earthquakes, and what he says is that when you're talking about earthquakes, quote, in all priests the ceremonies, whether ritual or pontifical, care is taken not at such

times to name one god more than another, for fear of impiety, since it is quite uncertain which God causes these visitations. I love it. They didn't want to they didn't want to assign blame without all the facts. Well that's that's good. I mean, you know, that's covering your bass. I approve of the hypothesis format of finding knowledge. Sure, and then of course you had sort of spiritual or

supernatural explanations in in the East as well. So like some ancient Chinese explanations seem to have read earthquakes again as divine punishments importance. But to continue with what our historian Marcellinus had to say, this was great because he also chronicled what some of the dominant practical explanations of the day were. So it wasn't that everybody just had this religious explanation. There were also the ancient natural philosophers

who were like, no, let's figure this out. Truly, something's going on under the earth. I mean, Aristotle surely had something to say about it. Oh yes, So quoting again from Marcellinus, and all of these quotes from Marcellinus are

from the seedy Youngae translation in English. But as the various opinions among which Aristotle waivers and hesitates suggest earthquakes are engendered either in small caverns under the earth because of the waters pouring through them with a more rapid motion than usual, or, as Anaxagoras affirms, they arise from the force of wind penetrating the lower parts of the Earth, which when they have got down to the encrusted solid mass, finding no vent holes shake those portions in their solid

state into which they have got entrance when in a state of solution. And this is corroborated by the observation that at such times no breezes of wind are felt by us above the ground, because the winds are occupied in the lowest recesses of the earth. Oh that's delightful.

That is that is so delightfully incorrect. I adore that. Yeah. So, I think the idea that was being propagated at the time by Aristotle and some of the other well not at the time by Aristotle, but had previously been propagated by Aristotle and then continued to be believed by many people was something having to do with the exchange of gases like wind and evaporation under the earth. And sometimes when like gases or evaporating uh vapors would get trapped

under the earth, sometimes they'd be released in a big burst. Sure. Sure, Although I suppose it is interesting that they were thinking about liquids and the motion that propagates in liquids because earthquakes are in fact caused by by waves of energy, which at their time was analogous. So analogous, which yes,

that thing. Yeah, but but I'm sure they probably weren't quite thinking yet of the idea of propagation of waves through rock, which must have seemed imposs of all So, as with many subject areas see cosmology and physics and plenty of things, Aristotle's ideas held sway for a long long time in Europe and in the Islamic world, despite the fact that they were super super wrong. Um Like, don't get me wrong about Aristotle. I'm not saying he was stupid. He was obviously a super smart guy of

the ancient world. I guess just everybody must have assumed he was right about everything. That's what they did. It's kind of funny if if you've never done this, like look up what Galileo overthrew about Aristotelian physics, and it'll just kind of make you wonder, like, how did people miss this for so long? It seemed so easy to

figure out. But anyway, Aristotle's ideas about earthquakes hell were very popular until the early modern period in Europe, and then some other physical explanations for earthquakes began to take hold in some circles, like explanations involving fire and explosive properties. Just one example like what if iron is reacting with sulfur deep under the ground and this explosive chemical reaction

is causing earthquakes? Even kind of makes sense because you can see like, okay, earthquakes sometimes or happening around fault lines, which they didn't know about then, but but around volcanoes they certainly knew about, yeah, bingo, and that volcanoes have

this explosive fiery element. Eventually, however, we started to get some more correct ideas about seismology, and according to a brief history of seismology given by a Duncan car Agony, which was my source on most of this historical stuff, one of the main events that seemed to trigger the modern era of earthquake research was the Lisbon earthquake of seventeen fifty five, which was huge and had crazy effects

throughout are up, including causing uh Sasia's or Seisha's. I believe it's satias, which are standing waves in these enclosed bodies of water. So if you've ever seen standing waves in water, it's where instead of the waves propagating along the surface, they sort of bob back and forth. Looks really crazy, especially if you were going to see that in like the lake Oh yeah, yeah, or I don't know, I'm picturing the scene in Jurassic Park where where the the cup of water is just going but but but

but not like that, just continually bounce back and forth. Yeah, I do not want creepy so this so anyway, this event caused some writers at the time to sort of see the effects of an earthquake as pressure waves propagating outward from a source through the elasticity of the rock in the Earth's crust, kind of like sound emanates through a solid medium. And from this time through the people

began to study earthquakes more scientifically. But you can kind of understand the faculty they would have, because think about it,

how do you study earthquakes. You can't like cause an earthquake, especially not with the technology of the time, and you can't predict when they're going to happen to set up your equipment, So it was very much an exercise in sort of gathering what data you could after the event and then trying to sort of do backwards experiments by analyzing the data you had available to you, which is very difficult to do, oh sure, especially right given the

technology of the time and the lack of electricity, let alone computers and all of that stuff. Although the first step I would say was around the mid eighteen hundreds when one Robert Mallett actually coined the term seismology. Yeah, and he also sort of brought a quantitative approach to studying wave propagation through the earth. He was big into looking at maps and collecting all kinds of data and

analyzing it quantitatively. But then, of course, one of the big things that's led to modern era of studying wave propagation through the Earth has been the development of seismometers or seismometers as one might say for some reason. Uh yeah, those being machines that detect seismic waves as seism graphs, which I think is the more frequently used term in in in popular culture at any rate, are our seismometers that record those waves, and many seismometers are in fact

seismic graphs. Yeah, it would obviously not be very helpful to detect waves and then forget about them. Uh no um. And and actually there's historical records of these from from way before the eighteen hundreds. Yeah. I think we don't fully understand exactly everything about this ancient one. But the idea is that the first mechanical seismometer was created in ancient China by the Han Chinese inventor in general all purpose genius Chang Hang in the one thirty two CE.

Oh goodness. And supposedly this device could tell the operator from which direction the vibrations of an earthquake originated, and even on at least one occasion anecdotally it recorded an earthquake that humans could not feel, so it was like too faint for humans to know been one. But the machine said, hey, there's an earthquake over here. Cool uh during that wave of interest wave huh um. In the in the eighteen hundreds, um, several mechanical models were produced

and kind of refined. Um. By nineteen o three we saw the first electromagnetic seismometer, and then digital equipment and and data processing technology started to be developed around the nineteen seventies or so, we could probably do an entire like series of episodes about seismometer technology. And maybe that's the thing. I'll poke Jonathan and see if he wants to do some episodes about about that on tech stuff, because there's so much out there and it's it's kind

of fascinating. Maybe it would be better in video because it's a whole lot of like pictures of pendulums working in different ways and spring loaded things. Dude, all of a sudden, to Jonathan talk about some pendulums do a good job, I bet he would. Okay, No, wait, how about some related technology? What about technology to measure those secondary effects of earthquakes that we're talking about earlier. Yeah, there's some I think within the past few decades. UM

a device called a sonometer. I think I'm saying that correctly. Tenometer either way, Uh yes, tsonometer is probably probably the correct way of saying that. UM. A sosonometer is a thing that detects changes in water pressure way deep within the ocean and can transmit that info via satellite to

warning centers. It's it's a weighted anchor containing sensors attached via tether to a boy on the surface that has you know, data crunching computer and transmission system, and it can give you a few hours of warning, um for tsunami activity. Yeah, so super valuable of course, because I mean, tsunamis can be especially devastating when you've got that wall of water. I don't know if you've ever seen video of what that looks like. It's absolutely terrifying. Oh yeah,

it's completely mind blowing. Um. Also mind blowing, I find um. It was basically readings from these early seismometers that led scientists to build the modern hypotheses of the makeup of the Earth, starting around like nineteen o nine and then ranging up through the thirties. That is when we figured out that the Earth has a solid core and molten stuff and a crust. And that is so recent it's it's crazy to me, Like I had, for some reason assumed that had happened in like the sixt dreds at

some point, but nope, yeah, crazy, So go seismology. Good job. That's just astonishing like that we had like relativity and quantum physics before we had a full understanding of the the Earth, right Yeah, And you know, to be fair, you can't go that deep into the earth. Um, you also can't go the speed a light, Lauren. Maybe you can't, Joe, Okay, but uh so. So it's really cool, of course that we were learning all of this stuff and and learning

how to take measurements of earthquakes. But how has all of this learning been applied in actually saving lives and preventing damage and predicting earthquakes. Well, I think one thing we should actually look at first before we talk about predicting earthquakes, because that's, as you will learn, quite a strange and iffi proposition. But we can at least talk about what we can do to our buildings and our

cities to make them safer in the event of an earthquake. Yeah. Yeah, Um, there are a bunch of different concepts of material and construction engineering that can help us safeguard our stuff against getting super destroyed. Yeah. I remember. I actually saw a headline a while back that was it was a piece I think in the wake of a recent earthquake that said something along the lines of earthquakes don't kill people,

buildings do. Right. That seems quite true to me. I mean that if you're standing in the middle of a field and an earthquake, you're gonna get knocked on your butt. But you know, I mean, I mean maybe if a fault in the earth opens up directly under your feet, that would suck. But but basically it just trips you. Sure, but when you come into real danger is when you are near a structurally unsound building that come toppling over

and crush you. Yeah, that that is that is much worse than falling on your butt on on a galactic scale. So what are some of the answers that material science and construction engineering have given us. One of the classic ones is called base i selation, And this is super not a new idea. Um. There's evidence that Iranian architects, or pre Iranian architects rather and engineers were purposefully constructing buildings with seismic base isolation starting around like five fifty BC,

So two five years ago folks were working on this. Well, I don't know if I should be impressed, because I don't know what it is, Okay. Base isolation is constructing two separate layers of a foundation for your building, that the layer against the ground is solid with the ground, and the the secondary layer between the first one and your building is solid with the building, but it is

capable of sliding against the lower foundation. Okay, Um, so if the ground shakes, the upper foundation and the building remain intact. Yeah yeah, um or I mean like up to a certain point. I think that over like a eight on the Richter scale, and you're just kind of it anyway. But um, but but this is really cool. Archaeologists have found structures such as the Tomb of Cyrus that have been standing for over two thousand years, partially

thanks to this type of structural safeguard. Safeguard, Well, how did they do it back then? I mean if they didn't have like ball bearings and or whatever, I don't know what people would actually use today. Giant loose slabs of rock is how they did it, basically, Um, like like one giant slab of rock for the base and a and a secondary unattached slab of rock for the

secondary base. I can just imagine the ancient Persian conversation that like create you know, like you can't have just one slab Nope, nope, we need two slabs here because then your earthquake comes and what are you going to do? You have an exposed Cyrus corpse that would just be rude. We don't we can't have that, um modern okay, oh sorry, I just want to update. I am impressed. Now that's smart. Yeah yeah, well, I mean it shows that they were thinking about it, and even thinking about it at that

point in time was probably pretty impressive. Modern Ly, a lot of buildings that are in danger zones will use these things called lead rubber bearing pads between the solid foundation and the building. And and these pads consist of a solid lead core that's wrapped in in alternating layers of rubber and steel bands. So vertically speaking, it's super solid. UM. Horizontally it's wibbly wabbli right, so it's not going to

get crushed, but it can shimmy. Yeah there yeah. UM. And a newish technology out of a Japanese company called Air Dunsion Systems Incorporated UM can temporarily suspend a smallish structure like a private home, on a cushion of air as a secondary foundation. UM. They work by having these seismic sensors in the homes primary foundation detect a coming quake and UM when that happened, and a really powerful air compressor will activate and feel like a like an

air bag in the secondary foundation in less than a second. Um. And then you know, when when the sensors detect the earthquake is over, the compressor switches off and the bag deflates, kind of bringing the home back down, um gently onto its first foundation. It's only lifting the structure like a little over an inch in the air. Maybe so, but that can make a difference. But that can make a

huge difference. Yeah, yeah, so uh kind of inexpensive way I suppose of conducting a base isolation on, especially a small home. As I read that the company was hoping to expand their systems for use in high rises, but I haven't been able to find anything more recent about what they've been doing, so I don't know. I hope they're out there. Yeah, good luck to them. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I think is interesting is studying the way that the ground actually transfers energy to buildings.

Oh yeah, because that's really your problem, right, that you've got all this energy coming into a rigid structure, and how do you dissipate it? Right? But I mean, really, the damage that earthquakes cause is because of how efficient energy transfer is. Like thanks a lot physics, um, but but see any given object has a resonant frequency or a group of resonant frequencies. And we've talked about that

a little bit on the show before. Um it means that when when the object vibrates, based on its its size and its shape and the materials it's made of, it's going to resonate at this specific frequency or group of frequencies maybe, And it's really hard to get something

to resonate at a non resonant frequency. Um So, if you if you put mechanical energy into an object the way that a seismic wave does, uh, it will vibrate just as much as it can, like a whole bunch at its resonant frequency, because energy is so efficient like that. Um But ut, what if you could get a structure to vibrate at a different frequency, at a lower frequency. But it's really hard to get an object to do that.

It just wants to resonate at that one frequency, unless, of course, you physically change the object on the fly, which is also not really a thing that you want to do to a building, or that it's physically possible to do to a building. I mean, unless you're like magneto or something like that. Um So, how can magneto do that. You'd have to be something else right now.

He could change the shape of a building by way by by moving around the steel structures or you know, or he could take some of the metal out of it put extra metal into it. I'm usually right about magneto, UM, but engineers who are not magneto have come up with various damper systems. One that's really great for skyscrapers is called a tuned mass damper. And in the system you suspend like a big old massive ing near the top

of a skyscraper. UM. It can be held in place with like fluid cushions or hydraulics or springs or cables or some wacky combination of the above, and UM that the mass and the hang of the system is tuned precisely to the resident frequency of the building, so that when an earthquake hits uh at, the building rocks one way and the system rocks in the opposite direction, which which helps reduce or kind of balance out the forces that are acting on the building, UM, thus preventing damage. Okay,

I can see. So it's like it's almost like trying to create a canceling wave for holding Yeah, exactly. Um. Yeah, yeah, it's sort of like noise canceling headphones of earthquakes. Yes, yeah, and you can think about it if it if it helps with the visualization, it's sort of like a pendulum awesome. Um. Another thing that engineers due to help to help prevent

damage to buildings is by bracing. And it sounds pretty obvious, but but but the way that they look at it is since most of the ground's movement during an earthquake is lateral, engineers can can compensate with incisive elements of strength and flexibility throughout a building that are designed to kind of spread the forces out evenly across the vertical

and the horizontal elements of the structure. Um. And and things that help with that include like having parallel and symmetrical designs, using diagonal trusses against walls, and using a moment resisting frames which are uh columns and beams that are bendy but have connectors that are rigid, so that during an earthquake, UM, the the whole the whole thing,

the whole frame moves is a single piece. Those elastic elements absorbs some of the energy and they can dissipate it without causing the building to crack or something right, right, it spreads the shock out across the entire structure, reducing damage to you one part or Another interesting way to approach bracing that I read about was specifically directing the energy dissipation or sort of like the damage centric zone to a replaceable part of the bracing structure, like like

a fuse. Yeah, that'd be something like the fuses you might have in your house. Well, hopefully you have circuit breakers now, but the house that had fuses would have You know, if a circuit gets overheated, well it can just melt the fuse and that's fine. You can just change that out. You've got a box full of them

and it's no big deal. But in two thousand nine, a team led by researchers at Stanford University in the University of Illinois successfully tested a building protection design that would keep multi story buildings from falling apart, and it would help return them to basically standing straight up upon the foundation after the shaking is over, so that the building doesn't like remain a hazard and then maybe fall

over afterwards. And they tested this design on a shake table, which is sort of what it sounds like, it's this huge thing to simulate earthquakes, and it was shown that it was capable of withstanding earthquakes with a magnitude up

to seven, which is pretty serious earthquake. But basically, these are steel frames that are designed to reinforce a building at the core or along the edge, and they dissipate the energy of the earthquake by rocking up and down within these cages at the foundations that they actually called shoes.

They act like shoes, and so running along the vertical length of the frames are steel cables or steel tendons, which are elastic, so you can think of that kind of like having a bunch of rubber bands or like those elastic stretcher cables holding your building in place and helping return it to an upright position right upon its

rightful place on the foundation. But at the bottom of these frames they had these things that they referred to as fuses, And basically the idea is that the fuses are the parts of the structure that will absorb the most energy and become damaged, and the fuses are designed to be replaceable. So if there's an earthquake, it tries to channel the energy into this fuse area which will be damaged and you'll have to replace it. But that's

you know, pretty easy to do. Cool. Uh So, so these are all ways that we have of preventing damage in the case of an earthquake. But but but let's say that an earthquake does strike and damage is caused. Um, how how are science and technology helping us better deal with the aftermath of earthquakes? Well, I know one of the things that is going on is something we talked about in our very recent episode about radar. Uh yeah, yeah,

the finder. Yeah. So just to revisit this concept briefly, it is a way of using radar technology to locate human beings trapped underneath rubble. Uh yeah, microwave radar specific lee and it this is radar so sensitive that it can detect the tiny palpitations of a human heartbeat through up to twenty feet of solid concrete or thirty feet of wreckage or a hundred feet of open space. So that's a bunch um and uh this is technology that I think was developed in out of NASA and and

it and it worked. And in the recent earthquake that happened in a Nepal in India, in april of rescuers located at least four living victims under ten ft of rebel. So, uh go team Doppler effect. That's awesome. UM. Other things that we have actually also touched on in the course of this podcast include, um using like robots and drones for rescues where it is impractical or unsafe for human rescuers to go. Yeah, we've talked about programming cockroach drones

to find people in in rubble right right, um. And also smart infrastructure that can engineers uh as to when and where damage has been done, so that hopefully before you know, if if a minor shock one year makes a crack somewhere in a foundation, that could be a problem later. That's a thing that like a sensor could go, oh hey, engineers, come, come, pay attention to me, and hopefully that gets repaired before a larger quake could bring

the whole building down. That's what you call a smart city, smart city, smart buildings as opposed to all these dumb buildings we live in now. Oh yeah, so dumb. But hey, what about the big question? How about the elephant in the room. Can we predict earthquakes? Can we do it? Can we know when and where they're going to happen, so that we can get people out of harm's way ahead of time. This is I think the main thing everybody wants to know, of course, And should we just

go ahead and say it. The answer is not really Yeah, yes, certainly not right now. Um And and a lot of a lot of researchers are are doubtful that we ever will be Um. The seismology community seems to at large be saying we'll probably never be able to determine this. Well, I mean we're trying, yeah, Um, like with with earth earthquake forecasting, which is studying the history and the present configuration of a fault and predicting how likely seismic activity

is in that area within a given period of time. Um. But again, according to a lot of seismologists, it's impossible to forecast when earthquakes will happen given what we currently know about how earthquakes work. We we haven't found a

pattern despite all of the data that we've been recording. Sure, and despite the fact that we can't say when I think we do want to emphasize something you just said, which is true, we can with some reasonable degree of accuracy say where earthquakes are going to happen, oh yeah, and not just I mean like obviously along the fault lines, but like along specific sections of a fault line. Yeah, so it's not necessarily going to be super specific, like telling you, you know in this will be right here.

But we can generally have a pretty good regionally based prediction about earthquakes. Unfortunately, the painful element of it is you just never really know exactly where or even roughly win. And there's actually a good article in the Washington Post about this by the writer Joel Aichenbach, who who talks about the frustration of scientists who sort of have this knowledge.

Like he he talks about how the earthquake scientists predicted that Catman Do would be, you know, would be vulnerable to an earthquake, that something was coming there, but they couldn't say they did in April of this year, and

they couldn't say when and then when it happens. It's just kind of this sense of frustration and like, well, I mean, there wasn't that much that we could do about it, because I mean, you can't you can't evacuate an entire population based on well probably sometimes soon sure, I mean unless you were just going to say, well, we just shouldn't have a city here. And then on top of that, there there can be unknown fault lines in places that we're not even you know, really privy to, Like,

there can be earthquakes in places that surprise us. They will happen less often, but they will happen, oh sure. And fault lines are not these these straight, perfect map lines. They're they're they're very jagged in crooked and can can go around to interesting new places that you didn't think

that they would go. Sure. Yeah. One thing is that when you have an earthquake in one place, it can dissipate energy that that puts stress on another part of the tectonic plate or another part of the fault line where you wouldn't have expected an earthquake before. And we won't necessarily know what's going to happen until it happens. Though, it is worth saying that earthquake forecasting is a real thing. I is. Cartography is sort of what you'd call it.

You can make maps and say, based on what we know, earthquakes are more likely to happen in these places within a certain long given period of time, right right, Um,

And there are relatively early warning networks. UM. As digital communication technology has improved, UH, seismologists have started constructing these these large networks of a whole bunch of highly sensitive seismometers that can automatically send out alerts not just to researchers but also to the general public and therefore give a little bit more warning, maybe seconds, maybe minutes before

an earthquake strikes. Um. And that's I mean, basically because seizemic waves only travel about three miles per second tops, and information can of course travel a lot faster than that. Your internet is faster than the earthquake. Yeah, yeah, hopefully fingers crossed. Um And And it sounds like that's absolutely no time at all, but but it's plenty enough to save lives of say, construction workers who are in precarious positions, or of patients who are undergoing surgery, or of of

people driving on the road. Um. And it also allows emergency responders time to begin to prepare. Yeah, it is certainly, I mean, even if it's just having a siren go off or something that could potentially be useful. But of course, what people really want to know is can we get much further ahead of the game and One of the big things that often comes up when you hear people saying no, I think we can predict earthquakes maybe weeks

ahead of time. Is animals. Oh right, Yeah, there are all of these kind of circumstantial reports of animal behavior changing dramatically a week or two before an earthquake. Yeah, people have reported this for years, supposedly, according to scores of anecdotes, fish, birds, rats, reptiles, I mean, what every all kinds of animals start acting we're weird before a

seismic event strikes. One early record is that the ancient Greeks reported that animals, including rats and snakes deserted the city of hellicay En mass before a huge earthquake destroyed it in the fourth century BC. Weird. But whether or not that's true, we would need to verify that it's a continuously occurring scientific phenomenon, not necessarily like just something that happened once, right, because I mean the behavior of for example, rats and snakes is relatively ineffable. I mean

sometimes they just do stuff. Yeah, sure, I mean, can animals really predict earthquakes well in advance? Number one? That would be a really useful fact were true. It would help us save lives, so it's worth studying. Unfortunately, this is one of those weird questions that's just really hard to answer. It seems to me, based on my reading, that generally most scientists are pretty skeptical about using animals

to predict earthquakes. Some researchers have claimed to discover links between animals and earthquakes, but the larger scientific community seems to remain pretty unconvinced. Us Unsurprisingly, one person who likes this idea is the biologist and parapsychologist Rupert shell Drake. He's expressed fondness for the idea that animals can predict

seismic activity. Though, if you know anything about this guy, shell Drake is one of those interesting people who's very smart, but it seems to me just generally in favor of whatever ideas are opposed to the mainstream scientific establishment. So you know, he's into paranormal phenomenon and he's the guy who promotes the concept of the morephic residence. Matter has

a memory and stuff like that. But there actually are some studies that we could look at, Like some people have claimed that animals might be using their extra sensory auditory capabilities to detect sounds outside the normal hearing range

or something like that. And some these claims are totally believable when they concern animals going nuts directly before an earthquake, but not so much weeks before, because if it's right before the earthquake strikes, that could be the same kind of thing we're talking about with these these Uh yeah, exactly, it could be the earliest four shocks are just that first pee wave that hits before the subsequent shocks do.

But I did find one recent study that's I think worth sighting, though I think I want to site it with caution because it just came out pretty recently, and it's one of those things that I don't know. It just seems like we would definitely want to get some more studies of this kind before we assign too much

credit to it. But anyway, it was a March study in the journal Physics and Chemistry of the Earth Parts A B n C by Grant, Rollin and Freund, and they claim that disturbances in animal behavior were present in the weeks leading up to a tooth As an eleven

earthquake in the Peruvian Andies. So here's what happened. They claimed that they used motion triggered cameras in a national park in Peru to measure the extent of wildlife activity, like you know, physical wildlife movement in the area, and they found that in the three weeks leading up to the earthquake, quote, animal activity declined significantly, and there was even less activity in the final like seven days before the earthquake. Now, the author's explanation for the claimed reduction

and animal behavior was really interesting. They suggested that it was another thing they measured concurrent with this reduction and activity, which was an increase in the positive airborne ion injection at the ground to air interface. So basically the earth injecting positively charged particles positive ions up into the air

and this disturbing animal behaviors. And they were suggest testing that this injection of positively charged ions into the air could be a result of some kind of preliminary earthquake precursor underground. Huh so so maybe maybe I mean, like I said, I want to stress caution with this kind of thing, because, uh, it seems to go against what we know so far, and it's it just came out recently. There might be good reasons for thinking there could be

problems with this study that we haven't read about yet. Sure. Um, I I did read another similar report that was published UM from the Open University in the UK via the Journal of Zoology back in and Uh they were reporting that five days before an earthquake struck struck Italy in two thousand, nine of the male toads in a population abandoned their breeding site. Uh. Their normal behavior would have been to have stayed through the awning, but they just

kind of up and left. And apparently, um, this behavior coincided with ion A sphere disruptions, although the cause of those disruptions was not discussed in the report or not reported in the report. Yes, yeah, I mean so I think that's very interesting. But I guess we again we don't really know. Yeah, but two reports does not make

an appropriate sample for making scientific decisions. Sure, but I do think that this is worth studying because if there is any truth to the fact that animal behavior can predict earthquakes, I mean, the scientists aren't suggesting that they have telepathy or something triggering the animal reactions. These triggers should be normal physical events that we could design instruments to look for. Oh yeah, one that I one possibility that I read about was emissions of rate on from

underground rock UM. Right on being a gaseous decay product of uranium which gets trapped in rocks UM, and the theory here goes that before an earthquake, kind of pre movements underground break apart rocks and release rate on up into the soil and water above UM. Since radon is radioactive and has a half life of of just like three to four days UM, it would be really a very useful metric to gather if a connection is in fact proven, But uh, no conclusive evidence has been found

as of yet. So you know, what I'm really thinking is if we determine that animals can sense earthquakes, and then we can use that to make an earthquake sensing machine, and then we can evacuate cities where earthquakes are going to happen before they happen. What's going to happen to the future of the earthquake disaster movie genre? Oh man, They'll all have to be fabulous period pieces. Yeah, Oh

that's right. The rock will have to put on like some like plaid and pretend to be some like grunge guy from the nineties when there is an earthquake in California. Yeah yeah, or like like a toga of some kind, and so that he can run around in a ancient Greek or Roman city. Oh yeah, yeah, while all the rats and snakes are fleeing. Yeah, you know, like the wind and the caverns under the earth. Where is it

gonna go? She's gonna blow? It would have to be Paul Gimi saying that though, Yeah, where's that wind a gonna go? How was my Paul impression? But I'm not I'm not positive about the quality of either the movie that we are hypothesizing or of your Paul Madi impersonation. Well, I apologize, No, never apologize for Paul impersonations. They're really They're all good. Well, anyway, bringing it back a little bit, well,

I do think that this is really interesting. And even if it turns out to be the case, which a lot of seismologists think is the case, that we will never be able to predict earthquakes, we can at least make our cities better, We can make our buildings better, we can do a better job protecting ourselves when the earthquakes do strike. And who knows, maybe one day we will find out that we can predict him ahead of time. Ah yeah yeah. And this isn't even for for new

cities alone. There are lots of ways that engineers are looking at for retrofitting buildings to make them stronger in places that we strongly suspect a quake will strike eventually. Yeah, so let's look at those seismographic maps and get to work. Yeah yeah. Um. So, thank you so much Jacob and Matt for for writing in. This has been a fascinating thing to research. And we got to watch the San Andreas trailer a whole bunch and that was endlessly entertaining.

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