Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe, brought to you by The
Thunderbolts Project at Thunderbolts.info In the Earth sciences the
significance of space weather and the Earth-Sun connection is becoming more
and more undeniable. The scientific case is now being made for the role of solar
activity and changes in the Earth's geomagnetic environment and earthquakes
and other natural disasters. If solar activity and other factors do contribute
to earthquakes, then one of the most important questions
scientists can ask is, can the likelihood of earthquakes be predicted? Today, the
founder of Space Weather News and the Mobile Observatory Project, Ben Davidson,
along with scientific colleagues, has developed an app that attempts to do
just that. We asked Ben to offer an introduction and overview of the app’s
genesis and development and the scientific foundation behind it.
Ben: In essence we began conceptualizing the app at the beginning of 2016.
We did a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the app in the spring of 2016;
a hundred and twenty thousand dollars was raised in about two weeks. And,
unfortunately, that is what it takes to really build an app and get all the
servers going and have back-end programs that you create and front-end app
programming, you know, that the user actually experiences, when they're
using the app and things like that. And it just came out
December 20th of 2016, right at the end of the year there. At this point, we
are just trying to spread the word about it and I don't want to say we've
become content in any way, but we are extraordinarily encouraged by what has
happened in just the first few weeks of the app being live. Of course, in the 30
days of the beta period we had with about 200 users before that as well.
And since the earthquake forecasting model portion of the app has been in
place, since the end of this past summer in 2016,
it has been very encouraging as well. So, it's sort of been a process that we
didn't really see coming, so to speak. We would have thought
something like this would have taken a few years, but in essence the app really
sort of came together in 2016. We got some good back-end programming,
some good front-end programming and now we have something that, right in the palm
of your hand, can talk to you about earthquakes and space weather. You know
there's a lot of skepticism when it comes to discussing space weather and
other electromagnetic signals and precursors of large earthquakes to come;
and that's understandable, because the efforts to do just that,
thus far have been, you know, somewhat failing. Most of the most used space
weather indices like sunspots, solar flaring, solar wind speed, geomagnetism;
like how big of a storm we get; how high the Kp index goes; things like that.
Those do not seem to be directly correlated with seismic events, although
quite a number of interesting coincidences do occur; it is difficult to
to get past that. However, most of that information is
becoming quite outdated and becoming outdated quite quickly; that comes from
2013, 2014. And in 2015, we wrote the paper, the initial paper on
how the solar polar magnetic fields are triggering magnitude 8 and larger
earthquakes. We did that with Dr. Kongpop U-Yen and with Dr. Christopher
Holloman from the Ohio State University; and followed that up with a second
paper in 2015 as well, also on the topic of how a lesser well-known space
weather factor, coronal holes and, more importantly, their distinct
electromagnetic output and their interplanetary magnetic fields that
reach out and touch the planets, how that
actually is the thing that we should be looking for with earthquakes, which was
never really studied in this way before. And what's interesting is most of the
headlines from third-party reporters on some of the studies that were done by
the USGS and others back in 2013-2014, maybe before that, showed that there was
no way to prove that the Sun had anything to do with earthquakes or, to
predict earthquakes in any way. That's the kind of thing where back then
the paper didn't even discuss coronal holes, and the paper didn't make a blanket
statement about the Sun, or about predicting earthquakes; it just said hey,
when we look at sunspots, solar flares etc., when we look at these specific
things, we don't see anything and thus far the predictive models don't seem to
work, thus far, and so while, you know, you'll see reporting on this, that has
really skewed public perception. The reality of what exists right now, is
setting the stage of what we know doesn't work; what the standard is for
figuring out what does work, and moving forward from there. Now, the first thing
we did was attempt to prove that the Sun triggers earthquakes. We have the two
peer-reviewed papers in 2015 on that, in New Concepts in Global Tectonics, but
almost immediately after that, we began working on compiling pre-seismic factors
that had been reported in studies throughout the last few years and the
last few decades, everything from pattern scientists thought they saw in foreshock
activity, and you know, published in the seventies; well we got a lot of time to
check and see if they were right since then. There have been papers published
about outgoing long-wave radiation anomalies, or total electron content
anomalies, problems or fluctuations with the L-shell magnetic fields, GPS
disruptions, EMF signals that sort of crop up out of nowhere, positive ion
emission, earthquake lights, animals acting funny before an earthquake. The
list does go on and on. These things are all published and
they've been published about for years, some of them decades. We have a lot of
time to see how they work. Turns out there are very few that work
better than others, a specific kind of foreshock analysis, an atmospheric
pressure analysis, and outgoing long-wave radiation, in terms of looking at where
we are to be seeing larger earthquakes soon, imminently, as in the coming
hours to just a few days. In terms of timing it which, you know, when you put
those areas on alert, when we think the Earth in general, is more ready to
have these big earthquakes, well then, that's when we look back to the original
papers we did back in 2015, where we absolutely agree with everything the
USGS actually said. We know that there are third-party reporters that said: “Oh,
the Sun can’t trigger earthquakes”, says the USGS. So, that's not what they said. What
they said is specifically: solar wind speed, geomagnetism, sunspots can't. They
did not close the door and overreach with their findings; that is
something that was done by other people. But using those things called
coronal holes and their effects on the Earth, you are able to get a pretty good
idea of the timing, the ebb and flow of Earth's upticks and downturns in large
earthquakes. You know what's really excellent about
this is: it doesn't require any trust and it doesn't require any advanced
knowledge. The good thing about our posting our
alerts on this app and our posting our alerts on Twitter as well, is anyone with
access to the Internet, can go and see what alert was posted when; it's clear as
day with big red lines and big red stars and yellow lines, you know, it's on
basically, a global satellite map to show you which areas of the world are on
alert. And of course, we chose Twitter as opposed to one of our own websites,
because that is a third-party timestamp. We
can't hack Twitter; we can't go and manipulate the times of these things.
It's essentially a permanent public record of what happened when, and so, we
are constantly doing this forecasting. It's not actual predictions of events to
come. It's using all of those factors; the
atmospheric pressure; the outgoing long-wave radiation; timing it, based on
the Sun; taking a look at what's happening beneath our feet as well,
for some of the more robust foreshock patterns. And we take the entire world’s
active fault lines and reduce them to about ten to twenty percent. Now, you say
ten to twenty percent, that's still a fairly large chunk of Earth. Well, at this
point I would have to say that these alerts are more informational,
educational, rather than actionable. Not the kind of thing where we can put a
city on alert, like it's put on alert for a hurricane, and tell a government to
commit resources and evacuate people. At least not yet.
It's more informational, but we have to take an intermediate step, to go
from no earthquake forecasting, to being able to give hurricane-like warnings, the
you know, what is tantamount to the practical equivalent of prophecy, would
probably be very unreasonable. This, we claim is the first good intermediate
step, and in that ten to twenty percent of Earth's active faults that
are identified at any given time we are capturing about seventy percent of the
magnitude 6 and larger earthquakes and we've had streaks of four in a row, five
in a row. We had a streak of 10 in a row, the kind of thing where, if this was just
random luck and you just sort of randomly placed your alerts around the
world, it would be about one in ten million chance of getting 10 in a row.
And so, specifically some of the big hits that have really taken
place (and there's a list of this that can be seen on Quakewatch.net), the
largest earthquake to happen during the run of the model was a 7.9 that struck
Papua New Guinea on December 17th and it was
in the alert zone. There was a pretty well-known magnitude 7.8 that struck New
Zealand back in November, actually caused a bit of a tsunami, it matched the,
It pretty much matched the largest earthquake they had ever had there. That
one was in an alert zone as well. The only six pointer to strike California
during the last few months, indeed over the last year and a half or so, was
back on December 8, 2016 during one of the only red alerts California has had.
We got the 6.6 in Italy, October 30th as well. We also got the 6.9
that struck El Salvador, very close to Thanksgiving. There have been about 25
total, large significant earthquakes. 18 of them have been in areas that have
been on alert according to these alert maps. Now, that's
the kind of thing where, by random chance at putting ten to twenty percent of the
world on alert, out of those 25 we actually should have just randomly got
about two, to three, to four of those earthquakes. But we shouldn't have gotten
eight; we shouldn't have gotten 14; we certainly shouldn't have gotten 18. I was
very happy that the Thunderbolts recently posted my talk from their last
conference, because it was largely about some of the most promising pathways
forward, and this really was one of them. I know you guys will be kind enough to go
ahead and put a link to that talk, right in the description box. So, if you're
listening to this Space News program, a link to that talk should be right down
below there. This is one of the things I was talking
about, and so far, it is quite fruitful. I have to imagine that it would have
been virtually impossible to come up with the forecasting model, or even see
how the Sun was affecting earthquakes to begin with,
within the box of the mainstream only. It's only by blending, you know, the
volume of work that the mainstream has given, with some of the
necessary adjustments that need to be made, with some electric universe
principles. That is really what is required in order to see, understand and
really come up with a way to make this information useful. For continuous
updates on Space News from the Electric Universe, stay tuned to Thunderbolts.info.
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