• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

California Earthquakes Are Preceded By Magnetic Field Changes

October 10, 2022 by Deborah Bloomfield

Faint but significant magnetic field changes have been detected days before Californian earthquakes. It’s not quite the holy grail of seismology, but it could illuminate the path – if the work stands up to further testing, it could allow warnings that could greatly reduce lives lost. The researchers who found the signal acknowledge it’s not currently clear enough to enable these warnings, but that could change.

Hurricanes are becoming more destructive, and far more people are living in their paths, yet deaths are falling since weather satellites transformed our capacity to predict them – might we achieve the same thing with earthquakes? Seismologists have put a lot of effort into trying, but so far with little success.

Advertisement

Dan Schneider of QuakeFinder thinks that may be about to change, with Schneider and co-authors reporting on observations of magnetic fields at 125 sensor stations buried along California’s major fault lines.

Between 2005 and 2019, the area experienced 18 earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 or larger. The authors looked for changes in the lead-up to each. It’s not an easy task, because so many other factors can affect the sensors – solar storms are an important example, but even rush hour traffic makes a difference – and these all need to be controlled for.

Although the authors report distinctive patterns, they stress these are not sufficient to justify evacuations. “The statistical signal is of modest size, which means that we can not directly provide a prediction that can be used to alert the public,” the paper states. “This study provides evidence that there is a physical change that can be observed in the days before an earthquake, but further scientific study is needed to understand this process.”

Advertisement

“It’s a modest signal,” Schneider acknowledged to Eos. “We are not claiming that this signal exists before every earthquake, but it is very intriguing.”

Tales of animals (or even people) who could detect earthquakes before they happened are thousands of years old.  Scientists have attempted to study this rigorously, but interpreting a subject’s behavior is an obstacle if they’re not able to talk. However, if these reports are true, there must be some physical change that is being detected. Magnetic fields are a plausible explanation, leading to decades of study and the installation of the sensors used here.

However, this is a classic example of the challenge of differentiating signal from noise, made more difficult by the (fortunate) rarity of major quakes to study.

Advertisement

Even if the signal is real, plenty of questions that affect how useful it might be remain unanswered. For example: do other fault lines show the same pattern, or at least a different one we can identify, before earthquakes? We also need to know if the signals prior to the most devastating earthquakes can be distinguished from magnitude 5 events in order to avoid crying wolf.

To produce useful predictions, the authors intend to continue expanding their sample size and addressing more confounding factors. However, they also note we currently don’t understand the mechanism associating magnetic signals with subsequent events. If the physical connection can be explained, it may open the way to better interpretation of signals in the future.

Advertisement

The article is open access at Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Tennis-Canadian teen Fernandez pulls off another upset to reach U.S. Open final
  2. Twitter accelerates again with Bitcoin tips, NFTs, recorded Spaces, creator fund and more
  3. Lamborghini Huracán STO: A final celebration before electrification
  4. Google to invest $1 billion in Africa over five years

Source Link: California Earthquakes Are Preceded By Magnetic Field Changes

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • New Study Unearths Humanity’s “Hidden” Crossings Out Of Africa
  • Trichonephila Clavipes: The Spider That Spins “Golden” Silk
  • The Southern Delta Aquariids And Alpha Capricornids Meteor Showers Will Dazzle The Skies Together Soon
  • Virus Found In Black-Eyed Pea Plants Could Be Used To Treat Cancer
  • Many People Have No Idea Where Oil Actually Comes From. It’s Not Dinosaurs
  • “World’s Rarest Elephant”: Meet Motty, The Only Known Elephant Hybrid
  • Missing 40 Percent Of Matter In The Universe Finally Discovered, Could We Be On Track For A Universal Cancer Vaccine, And Much More This Week
  • Solar Power Producing Heliostats Could Get A “Night Job” Finding Asteroids
  • COVID-19 Can Lead To Build Up Of Alzheimer’s-Linked Protein Clumps In Eyes And Brain
  • The Wild Life Of Snowflake, The Only Albino Gorilla Ever Known
  • Stunning Drone Footage Reveals Largest Turtle Nesting Site In The World, Containing 41,000 Females
  • New “Different Form” Of Type 1 Diabetes Found In Sub-Saharan African And Black American Patients
  • Neanderthals May Have Feasted On Maggots, Which They Harvested From Rotting Flesh
  • Common Cannabis Substitute May Be Far More Psychoactive Than Previously Thought
  • This Is The Most Bizarre International Border In The World
  • Earth Will Not Fall Into Darkness Next Week – But There Is An “Eclipse Of The Century” In 2027
  • 850,000-Year-Old Remains Suggest Prehistoric Child Was Decapitated And Eaten By Its Own Kind
  • How To Watch The ISS As It Crosses The US Night Sky In The Next Few Days
  • “Robo-Bunnies” Are Florida’s Newest Weapon Against Python Invaders
  • Are We About To Get The First-Ever Negative Leap Second?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version