Posted on 12/26/2009 11:36:52 AM PST by Free ThinkerNY
For thousands of years astrologers have claimed that disasters are foretold in the movement of the planets.
Now a new study suggests they might be right.
Scientists have discovered that the faint gravitational tug of the sun and moon can set off tremors deep underground in one of the world's most dangerous earthquake zones.
Although the pull of planetary objects is too weak to set off a full blown quake, the findings suggest that they could set in motion a chain of events, leading to devastation on the surface.
The findings come from a study of the San Andreas Fault - the infamous crack in the ground which triggered the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the deadly fires that followed.
The fault marks the boundary of the Pacific and North America tectonic plates and runs 800 miles from the southern California desert to northern California.
American earthquake experts compared records of 2,000 small tremors in the Parkfield region 170 miles north west of Los Angeles with the movement of the sun and moon over eight years.
The same gravitational tugs that create the tides, also trigger small tremors that originate around 15 miles below the ground, the team report tomorrow in the science journal Nature.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Seems like a logical conclusion to me.
Cheers!
...and Merry Christmas.
We think of the world as more or less orderly (the sun rises in the east and sets in the west) but every day brings some type of chaos...Look at the Phillipine Volcano...
Since all things must be connected, I can see their theory as quite possible.
Merry Christmas to you and all my Freeper friends!
Makes sense to me. A friend of mine is a sexton for many of the local cemetaries and he swears there are predicable tides in the earth. He says the best time to backfill a grave is at “low tide” because he can get more earth back into the hole.
Neither of which is a planet.
I believe this has been conventional wisdom for decades. When a quake is trembling on the edge, tidal forces are likelly to push it over.
In Los Angeles earthquakes are called looting day.
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
- John Donne, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, Verse III
Earth tides are very, very small. Sounds more like confirmation bias to me.
Precise orbit predictions (among other things) take account of solid tides, which are a slight bulge of the Earth in response to lunar and solar gravity. It's not a huge effect, but it matters.
I could see your friend's story being right; and this article makes sense in that context.
Its not a big difference but enough for someone with nearly 30 years of experience to recognize.
Congress needs to get busy and start regulating these heavenly bodies.
This is not science. How can it be tested? We cannot remove the remove the presence of the moon and the sun to attempt to falsify this hypothesis. The tidal presence of both are a constant variable that may or may not have a relationship to tectonic movement (probably does) but how do we prove it? At this juncture, it is only a conjecture, perhaps an observation of a correlation.
Where,d that double “remove the” come from? Ah, well. . .
...but how do we prove it?
&&&
Scientists usually do not claim to “prove” any hypothesis; an experiment has the capability merely of supporting said hypothesis.
I know. So far, I have read three articles on this claiming the scientists have "shown" or "proved" that these mini quakes and tremors are being caused by by the sun and the moon. That is what I am challenging.
But, you’re right, I should have phrased that “How do we disprove it?” which was the point of my post.
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