Experts can’t predict Big One? How ’bout pets?

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

Years ago, Cal Orey just wrote about unconventional methods for predicting earthquakes. Now she's using them herself.

"I'm getting hits again and again, within a 24- to 72-hour time frame," the author-journalist said from her South Lake Tahoe home near the California-Nevada border.

But she's also a little self-conscious about claiming that migraines, dreams, a ringing in the ears or her pet dog Simon could point to future tremors. "I would think that you're going to make fun of all of this," she said.

Orey is among thousands of people seriously looking for portents of seismic activity in other natural phenomena, ranging from magnetic disturbances and phases of the moon to animal behavior and the premonitions of "earthquake sensitives." The seekers include Internet chatterers, free-lance geologists and entrepreneurs as well as scientists from Russia, China and even NASA — but not the U.S. Geological Survey.

"As a scientist, I'd like to say 'never say never,'" said USGS geologist David Schwartz, chief of the San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake Hazards Project. "But to get to this short-term prediction from a magnetometer reading, or a horse running around a corral, or your kitty running away — I think that's very marginal."

Instead, most earthquake researchers are trying to get a better picture of patterns in seismic activity, by making long-term measurements of ground strain along faults, analyzing how Earth's crust moves before and after earthquakes, and developing statistical forecasts for future seismic shocks. It's the kind of study that was pioneered a century ago, in the wake of the catastrophic San Francisco earthquake.

"A tremendous job was done after the 1906 earthquake in making the observations of everything that really occurred," Schwartz said. "We are still using that report today as a fundamental source of material about what earthquakes do, and how to respond."

What good is a 30-year prediction?
The problem is, the mechanism behind earthquakes appears to be so complex, and rooted so deep underground, that seismologists can forecast the future only in terms of decades. In 2002, for example, the USGS said the San Francisco Bay region had a 62 percent chance of experiencing a quake of magnitude 6.7 or stronger by 2032.

"My question is, how good is that?" Orey said. "If they give us a 30-year forecast that the Bay Area is going to have a major quake, what does that mean?"

The Holy Grail of earthquake prediction would be to anticipate the time and location of strong tremors mere hours or days before they occur. But is such a system even possible? Here's a look at some of the paths Orey and other grail-seekers are pursuing:

• Orbital alignments: Retired geologist Jim Berkland charts "seismic windows" — time frames with a heightened potential for earthquakes, based on tides, phases of the moon and Earth's proximity to the sun and moon. Berkland believes that the extra flexing of the earth's crust caused by the gravitational pull of the sun and/or moon (the same forces that cause the earth's tides ) can set off a fault that's ready to shift. Orey has written about Berkland for 20 years, and he's the title character of "The Man Who Predicts Earthquakes," her newly published book. "I'm on record for having predicted two 7-magnitude quakes," including the 1980 Eureka quake and the 1989 World Series quake, Berkland told MSNBC.com. Overall, he claims a 75 percent success rate — using his own criteria for judging success. By the way, under his methodology, Berkland's next window of earthquake opportunity runs from April 25 through May 2.
• Animal sixth sense: The idea that animals can sense tremors in advance is as old as the ancient Greeks of 373 B.C. and as new as the Asian tsunami of 2004. Orey, for example, suspects a tremor could be on the way when her dog Simon or her cat Kerouac gets unusually jumpy or clingy. Other pets may get the urge to run away. Berkland, too, believes that animals may provide short-term warning of earthquakes and has tabulated the number of lost-pet ads in newspaper classifieds in an attempt to narrow down the area where California earthquakes might hit. The critter connection also has been the subject of research by the Chinese, and even the USGS looked into it for a while in the 1970s. For instance, the 1975 evacuation of Haicheng in China, just hours before a major earthquake, is often cited as a success story for animal prediction. However, China's animal-alarm system has also missed the mark badly — with the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed more than 242,000 people, cited as the most devastating failure.
• Human sixth sense: So-called "earthquake sensitives" trade their own quake premonitions on Berkland's Web site, SyzygyJob, which has 150 registered users. Some report a sense of nausea, or ominous dreams, or a ringing in one ear or the other. For Orey, it can be all of the above. She recalled getting her first "ear tone" one day while she was interviewing an earthquake sensitive. "The next day, a Japan quake hit," she said.
• Magnetic field shifts: Berkland speculates that the sixth sense in animals and humans responds to disturbances in Earth's magnetic field, brought on by the seismic precursors of earthquakes. "I'm 99.9 percent convinced that it's the magnetic field," he said, "because we know that just about every animal has some magnetite in it." That may sound like a load of hoo-hah, but harder-headed researchers like NASA's Friedemann Freund have put forth a hypothesis that underground stresses in the rock generate electromagnetic waves, due to a well-known phenomenon called the piezoelectric effect. In fact, this year Russia is due to launch a satellite called Compass 2 with the aim of charting potential connections between magnetic disturbances and seismic disturbances. And China has its own seismo-magnetic research satellite in the works, as space official Luo Ge noted just this month.

As far as the USGS earthquake researcher Andy Michaels is concerned, however, all these theories are mere "sideshows" for the real action in seismology.

"You can come up with anecdotal case studies for one thing here or there, but it’s never stood up with respect to the animals," he told MSNBC.com. "With the moon, it’s a small effect. In some very large statistical studies, some people have found a relationship that would be useless for predicting earthquakes. It might tell us a little bit about the physics of earthquakes, but some of those studies are also quite controversial within the field."

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