Earthquakes are an internal phenomena, with a great variability of parameters and condition influencing their occurrence. Anamoulus animal behaviors were noticed before some earthquakes, I seek all useful positive or negative personal experience concerning this issue, to see if it is possible to make progress in clarifying animal behavior as possible precursory to earthquake occurrences. Thank you.
Najib, What you are looking at is very true and factual. I grew up in Papua New Guinea during the 70's and due to the geological structure of the environment I experienced and lived through many very large earthquakes. Some of my greatest memories are of the eerie calm and mass exodus to "high ground" of the animals. The dogs would quiet as would the birds and other jungle animals and thats when you knew it was time to follow them. Walking outside to see the sky full of birds and animals of all sorts in the open areas and on the roads moving uphill was incredible. The local natives did the same in fear of the potential tsunami that could follow. When the birds and animals left to move back down, the local people followed. Their natural instinct for safety and safe environments was listened to and followed by everyone.
Thank you Dibakar and Dean for your important contributions. Have a nice day.
The connection between animals anomalous and earthquake prediction began in 1975, when Chinese successfully predicted a major earthquake, using observations of abnormal animal behavior. The entire population of Haicheng was evacuated before a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck the area, saving thousands of lives.
Low frequency sound below 50 hz (infrasound) explains the anomalous behavior far from epicenter and behavior of fish. Mice and rats hear and speak upwards to 80000 hz.
Thank you Dr Raed
At the beginning of the 1980s, I was present on a scientific day organized at the "Institut de Physique du Globe- Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris" where a team of top Chinese scientists was invited to talk about the Chinese experience in predicting earthquakes, a discussion followed where the head of the Chinese delegation declared that their prediction was based on geophysical measurement rather than animal behavior, I undersood that day an important point about that particular prediction, the city was evacuated 16 times on false alarms before succeeding to save tens of thousands of people. Unfortunately 6 months after the "predicted" earthquake a disastrous new one struk an area about 100 km from the first epicenter which left hundreds of thousands of victims. This shows the limits of that particular successful prediction.
It is true that animals can sense earthquake. We do lot of research on the same by setting up observatory. But pinpoint the place and magnitude is difficult.
Thank you Anirbid, It may be necessary to filter the events and behaviors, to keep only the clear and rather strong ones to better insure the causality relationship between the anomalous behavior and the earthquake phenomena, one of the difficulties is there are many animals and many causes and conditions capable of provoking anomalous behavoirs for some of them. Not all anomalous behaviors are related to earthquakes.
I have 2 observations to add concerning animal behavior and Earthquakes. Although Jordan is an of relatively moderate earthquake activity at least in the instrumental seismicity period during the last century and up to now. After a moderate 5.1 magnitude earthquake located NE of Jordan on 31-3-1989, I distributed a questionnaire to evaluate the felt intensity and obtain an isoseismal map. I got hundreds of feedbacks, one of them said the following" we were several friends playing cards one of us had a dog who started pulling his owner with clear insistence, the dog was constantly pushed and ignored, we noticed that the dog seemed so sad, minutes later we felt the shaking of the earthquake which happend about 2 AM. The second observation, in winter 1992, I was with my students in a field trip to show then a known active landslide area on Jerash highway northern jordan. When we arrived, although it was very cold we noticed a local farmer killing a snake, snakes are certainly supposed to be in hibernation stat during such a cold time being cold blooded reptiles. a plausible explanation, the snake waked up from it's stat of hibernation because of the pressure and squeezing deformations in the landslide area, similar thing may happen in earthquake imminent areas.
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