electronic detection of earthquakes

Hi all

I happened to find the following book at Amazon, and had a question about it:

Ionospheric Precursors of Earthquakes by Sergey Pulinets and Kirill Boyarchuk ISBN: 3540208399

The book description states: The book aims to explain the variations of near-Earth plasma observed over seismically active areas several days/hours before strong seismic shocks. It demonstrates how seismo-ionospheric coupling is part of the global electric circuit and shows that the anomalous electric field appearing in active seismic areas is the main carrier of information from the earth into the ionosphere. The discussion of physical mechanisms is based on experimental data. The results can be regarded as the basis for future applications such as short-term earthquake prediction.

URL to the book:

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My question is, has anyone actually built a working device that can
detect an earthquake based on the principles outlined in the book?
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Reply to
S Claus
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Sergey-Pulin...

Well, essentially yes. After the real engineers established that electronic *processing* is a branch of chemistry, rather than engineering, that's were all the robots, lasers, cells phones, optical computers, laser disks, fiber optics, Holograms, GPS, Autonomous Vehicles, Drones, Cruise Missiles, On-Line Banking, On-Line Publishing, Digital-Terrain Mapping, Microcomputers, Parallel Processors, and post GM Robotics came from. So the only way to detect an Earthquake is actually ferro- chemically, rather than electronically.

Reply to
zzbunker

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Seems very expensive for what it is. Try ADS abstracts first or inter library lending. My suspicion is that it doesn't work reliably. If it sees anything I would hazard a guess it was changes in the earths conductivity.

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I very much doubt it. Earthquake prediction is a Holy grail.

They may be able to say after the event "hey maybe we saw something unusual in the ELF/VHF Ionosphere signals". But the ionosphere is quite often doing something unusual. If anyone has built an earthquake predictor using this method it will be the Japanese - after all they still have tanks of fish camera monitored for their alleged sensitivity to earthquakes.

You can detect them easily enough when in progress. And I would swear I was in an earthquake in Japan where I heard it coming for 2-3 seconds before the ground suddenly jolted to the side by about an inch. Every maglev turbo pump running in the Tokyo area was totalled that night.

Regards, Martin Brown

Reply to
Martin Brown

Just attach wireless bark sensors to a statistically significant number of dogs. If they all start barking and going berko at once, good chance an earthquake is on the way.

Dave.

Reply to
David L. Jones

I'm skeptical about this. I don't know about these guys in particular, but this subject has been bandied about in pseudo-science areas for many years. As I recall, the root hypothesis was that mechanically-strained quartz or other piezoelectric minerals would generate high voltages at a fault before breaking/slipping.

But this was an "armchair theory" devised to "explain" a lot of poorly-documented "observations" like UFOs, unusual animal behavior, and psychic nonsense. (The UFOs were supposed to be balls of plasma.) The whole thing was a complete house of cards built on wishful thinking.

Now, many years later, it's *possible* that there has been some real science done on this, but I doubt it. I would bet that this is nothing more than the same wild conjecture in absence of any measured data. Caveat emptor!

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v4.51 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

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Reply to
Bob Masta

book:

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Think of the piezo-electric effects from the huge strains inside the Earth.

I would suppose that some monster electric fields would precede the final cracking of the rocks.

Cats seem to be able to sense earthquakes.

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Reply to
a7yvm109gf5d1

Bob, I tend to agree with you. Bravo to Amazon if they removed this book from their offerings, because it appears to be nothing but pseudo scientific crapola.

First, because theere is no "plasma" surrounding at risk regions. (The author evidently didn't even know what a "plasma" is.) Secondly, the author doesn't appear to undersatand piezo electricity, which is a temporal event (dV/dt), and not an electrical force that can be continually monitored.

The author clearly does not understand the difference between a "strain gauge" and a piezo electric sensor (which is essentially a microphone) and is clearly tossoing out crapola just to sell books and earn money. If Amazon has indeed taken this piece of pseudo- scientific crap off their shelves...It raises my opinion of them and their ethics.

That said, let me add the following comment which is somewhat off topic. I really worry about the "dumbing down of America". For those of you that think this in unreal, watch the current replacements of the ATMs at Bank of America locations. The new machines requre to deposit checks individually, rather than collectively in a sealed envelope. As told to me by a bank employee, this expensive optical reading switch is simply because a large portion of our country no longer has the ability to add correctly, and it was costing the banks so much to re-process the addition errors that it actually saves them money to incorporate optical scanning into their ATMs, rather than to have their customers compute the sum of multiple checks.

That's pretty bad, and worse still is the fact that these people who cannot add up the sum of a few checks correctly actually get to chose our government leaders.

This scares me.

Harry C.

Reply to
hhc314

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The book is probably over priced nonsense, but there are just enough papers in ADS abstracts to make me think that dismissing it completely out of hand may be premature. Testing the observational data is the first step to see if there is real signal or mere coincidences.

It may or may not be a useful predictor but there have been ELF and VLF events in the ionosphere that the authors claim were just prior to major quakes. It would require too much time to check the papers since I don't have easy access the those journals. I suspect there may also be plenty of them where nothing special happens too.

If you have an academic subscription and the time and patience try

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I confess I am curious about what if anything they are seeing. I doubt it is anything useful, but since no other earthquake prediction methods work well...

Regards, Martin Brown

Reply to
Martin Brown

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There was a web page about an VLF monitoring project that I can't seem to find anymore.

Essentially what they were trying to do is get volunteers to monitor and record signals from as many locations as possible to determine if there was in fact any correlation between such signals and later earthquakes.

I have no idea how sucessful they were in any aspect of the project.

Most research of this type appears to be occurring in Japan.

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Jim Pennino

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Reply to
jimp

Whoa! While I agree with everythng else you said (including the parts I snipped below this), piezoelectric effects can definitely be static. This is a standard method for micro-positioning in things like atomic force microscopes. The elements I've used (for positioning microelectrodes in biological experiments) are little ceramic tubes, about 1/4" in diameter and an inch or so long. The ends are silvered, and you apply a DC voltage between them to control the length of the tube. The control voltage is in the

0-1000V range.

That's going in the voltage-to-force direction, but this effect is reversible. I suspect that you got onto the dV/dt idea because piezo effects are more commonly used in vibrating applications like oscillator tuning (quartz or ceramic) or microphones and earphones.

But of course that doesn't imply that geological strain can produce big (or even measureable) surface fields. I'll await data on that...

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v4.51 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

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Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter FREE Signal Generator Science with your sound card!

Reply to
Bob Masta

There has been a paper or two every year on this topic at the American Geophysical Union Meeting. The intriguing question is whether these changes start

*before* an earthquake. Thats unanswered.
Reply to
rick++

There is a lot on the subject. I don't think they have mentioned pietzo electrics per se as they are the subject of research and it's in its infancy at the moment. Far field triggering and seismic lensing might get you started on the material.

It's pretty obvious that the inference is pietzo elctricality but until further research is funded, it isn't possible to state the obvious.

I started putting some stuff about it on-line but got distracted before I finished -as usual.

Reply to
Weatherlawyer

There are plenty of precursors but sadly the relevant databases that should be built to take advantage of them is sidelined by people like the yahoo above.

Whilst the rest of the world hangs on for contemporary geology to wake up and smell the coffee, seismologists will continue to bang their heads against reality.

All very sad really. Still, never mind, eh?

Reply to
Weatherlawyer

I am convinced the recent eruption was warned of in the MetOffice's North Atlantic Chart.

A move to fairly high "low pressures" and fairly low "high pressures" foretells volcanic disturbances as has been seen on the net the last few days. Especially if the weather spell is out of kilter with what the time of the phase indicates it should be.

I put some of the charts on here:

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Reply to
Weatherlawyer

No.

There is no reliable way to predict an earthquake yet, in a useful manner. You can say "San Francisco will probably have a magnitude 7 quake in the next 10 years... probably"; but detecting a buildup of stress is, as yet, a long way from giving a *useful* warning.

Of course it is worth following every viable avenue of enquiry in the hope something will prove useful.

--
Nemo
Reply to
Nemo

Argh! I've cross posted! Apologies everyone. Just hit the "reply" button.

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Nemo
Reply to
Nemo

Thank you for your consideration. I don't know which groups you x-posted to, though, so I'm broadcasting too.

Reply to
Androcles

Newsgroups: sci.electronics.basics,sci.electronics.design,sci.physics,sci.geo.earthquakes

Any decent newsreader gives you access to the headers to discover this. This may not include outhouse express.

Reply to
JosephKK

Actually, cross-posting is preferable to multi-posting, as long as the topic is plausibly within the purview of the groups involved.

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Cheers! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

With so many newsgroups it makes one wonder why all posts end up in sci.physics as well -- especially American politics and religion. I see little of Norwegian, Irish, Sudanese or Argentinean politics. For a nation that is a melting pot of many cultures the USA is peculiarly interested in maintaining a British form of government but not religion - we kicked out Jews and Catholics hundreds of years ago. Can we discuss electronics and earthquake physics now instead of varieties of x-posting, please?

Reply to
Androcles

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