Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project™
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In the first of this two-part episode, our guest Ben Davidson,
the founder of Suspicious0bservers.org and The Mobile Observatory Project,
began explaining why the electromagnetic Sun-Earth connection
may be the key to a new understanding of natural disasters on Earth.
For several years, Ben and a community of colleagues have gathered a library of data
on space weather and evidence for its connection to earthquakes,
changes in climate, major storms and other effects.
This growing body of evidence suggests it is not a coincidence
that the recent catastrophes in September of 2017,
including the 8.1 magnitude earthquake off the southern coast of Mexico
and the devastating hurricanes Irma and other storms,
occurred simultaneous with major solar activity.
In fact, on September 6 of this year,
the Sun released its largest solar flare in 12 years.
Today, Ben elaborates the significance of the space weather connection to earthly catastrophes,
particularly earthquakes and why such events may indeed be predictable.
Our peer-reviewed papers, back from 2015, were mostly on earthquakes
and this is where things have been interesting
because we had been in about an 8 month earthquake drought at high magnitude,
one of the most significant on record.
During a period of about 8 months when, statistically speaking,
we should have had somewhere, you know,
between 10 to 15 magnitude 7 or higher earthquakes, we had one.
But that silence was abruptly ended here on September 8
when a magnitude 8.1 earthquake struck the subduction zone of Mexico,
actually moved it about 30 feet, created small tsunamis
but the real damage was on land where it created a lot of infrastructure problems,
collapsed a lot of homes and there were a number of dozen people who lost their lives.
Now, this marked the largest earthquake to occur in more than a century in Mexico
but, in another record, it was the largest earthquake to occur in the just shy of one year
that our earthquake forecasting model has been running.
It started on October 15th 2016, as it currently stands,
and we are almost ready to wrap up our first year
and, you know, go back and do the analysis.
This 8.1 was the strongest and largest magnitude earthquake of these, you know,
virtually 11 months since we began forecasting
and it was indeed part of the red alert, the high alert zones,
people have different names they like to call them, I want to make sure I include every,
all of them if they're listening, you know, sometimes we use alert stars
but we have the system of identifying about the 10 to 15% of the world's active faults
that are most at risk at any given time
and we further restrict it to about 10 to 15% of the Ring of Fire
because if you wanted to, sort of cheat, you could use that 10 to 15% of global faults
and cover about, you know, 25 to 30% of the Ring of Fire,
we don't think that would be fair.
And so, those are the two restrictions and those are pretty much the only two restrictions
and when it comes to earthquakes, we look to the most recent alert that was posted,
we update this just about every day, usually multiple times per day and you will,
you'll find these on Twitter or at Quake Watch or we have links to them all over really,
but the essence of, of what it is, is, there are, it is a map of the globe
and there are tiny little alert zones posted very, very prominently and clearly
in bright colors, there it's very clear where the red alerts are..
While magnitude-6 earthquakes have not been nearly as successful,
in terms of being able to be forecasted as we would have liked,
we have been able to forecast 75% of the magnitude 7, or higher earthquakes,
using only that 10 to 15% of the active fault zones in the Ring of Fire.
And that includes, as I said, the largest earthquake which was a magnitude 8.1 in Mexico.
One of the things that we look for are these sharp upticks, you know,
on a week-in, week-out basis, we're actually looking at another solar phenomenon
called a coronal hole.
It's these large.. they appear dark in the Solar Dynamics Observatory images,
they really are dark holes in the solar atmosphere
but they only appear that way because of a lack of charged particles
that are there to be picked up by certain ion detectors
and certain different wavelengths of light detectors.
The reason there's no particles in the atmosphere there is,
that's where the magnetic fields of our star
are not looping from surface point to surface point
but in what they call open flux, which isn't really a good term,
they're not really open because it really is kind of a closed system
and there's a plasma transfer back and forth from the Sun to the planets
through that magnetic connection but, you know,
that is what we normally use because, you know,
that doesn't have to deal with Earth's magnetic field,
called the magnetosphere, and it has proved, basically for years now,
to be one of the most reliable ways to tell when a big earthquake is going to occur.
But the other way to tell is when the Sun has one of these very, very rare,
super fast upticks from quiet,
you could say, and we were really utterly quiet,
we had so many days without any sunspots at all
to, all of a sudden, we have one of the strongest solar flares on record
followed about 24 to 48 hours later by what was probably a much bigger one
that we just didn't have direct visibility of.
And here we have this titanic earthquake
and this titanic hurricane uptick at the same time.
Well, you could say that, ok well, that's an interesting coincidence,
let's see if it happens again.
Well, I heard that exact same thing when I presented this back in 2015
and it was a response to, look this is what happened in the past as well.
And so, perhaps those questions will keep being asked in the mainstream
which is where most of the important questions and the important news comes from,
which isn't always the best thing for folks and,
you know, trying to do research like this.
But, the information is out there, it is easy to see it for yourself,
it's really as simple as just watching the Sun and,
when it comes to the earthquake forecasting,
watching the global electric circuit as well
which, to be honest, is as simple as just looking for a high pressure, low pressure,
water vapor and thunderstorms, something that
we have good data for all over the world.
So, the models have really, again as I said, come together in a very bittersweet way,
we indeed forecasted a magnitude 8.1 earthquake and
I guess that that is the, that's the sort of poison of forecasting natural disasters,
either you fail or it's terrible news and you succeed.
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