Saturday, April 24, 2010

So Now It's Frogs That Predict Earthquakes?

Given the recent SoCal earthquakes, this may be interesting: a researcher watching toads in Italy noticed that they left their breeding area, then 3 days later, an earthquake struck.

(Cue X-files music)

There are many, many stories of animals mysteriously sensing impending earthquakes. There was even a guy in San Francisco who said he kept track of the number of dog run-aways and a few years ago when he saw a spike, announced that the Big One was coming. Guess what? No Big One. I imagine that anomalous animal migrations happen all the time, and when they're near an earthquake, we humans with our confirmation bias notice. As much as it would be nice to believe we've found a reliable way to predict quakes, the jury is still out on this until someone figures out an experiment that can distinguish between actual causation, vs. fooling ourselves with wishful thinking.

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