Posted on 05/17/2008 12:48:46 AM PDT by wsjreader
CHENGDU, China — The birds suddenly disappeared from the sky. Something also was wrong with the pandas. They were strangely skittish. And then, within minutes, the isolated, verdant mountains above China’s most famous panda reserve exploded as if hit by a megaton bomb. “The pandas were agitated and pacing,” recalled Pamela Capito, 60, a member of a 12-person American tour group visiting the reserve. “When the earthquake hit, we realized they had sensed it coming.” If the pandas did sense approaching calamity, one reason is that the Wolong Nature Reserve sprawls over 772 square miles of rugged terrain directly beside the epicenter of Monday’s quake. Foreign tourists evacuated to Chengdu by military helicopters described a horrifying disaster followed by a dangerous escape made possible by the kindness, and heroism, of panda keepers and other workers who helped save them, as well as 13 panda cubs. “These keepers were risking their lives,” said Walter Weber, one of three American tourists interviewed Friday morning before they flew to Shanghai. “There was nothing safe about any of it.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Exploding pandas, sharks with lasers, and barack obama, oh my!
That’s strange. If I were a bird, the sky is where I would be if an earthquake was coming.
yeah, that’s right—birds do take to the air immediately before
you sense that there is an earthquake.
then you attempt to walk on an asphalt parking lot that has waves like water.
then the dogs start barking, the car alarms go off, and the electrical transformers start buzzing to announce that the earthquake is over.
I seem to recall the Chinese and their sympathetic American voices over here doing a great deal of research and lecturing about using animals as earthquake detectors in the wake of their massive earthquake in (I think) 1972? Theory was - if I’ve got any memory - that the animals detect rising concentrations of radon released from rocks fracturing under pressure and venting through stress fractures forming just prior to the main event.
If so, what happened to all the academic grandstanding and research dollars? Recounting animal behavior - again - after the fact does little to help anyone.
Animals have a better way of predicting things.
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