Posted on 05/15/2008 6:20:33 AM PDT by NYer
A nurse tries to comfort Liu Lu, an 11-year-old girl who survived Monday's powerful 7.9 magnitude quake after her school collapsed in Hanwang, as she cries in pain while receiving medical treatment at a hospital in Deyang, in Sichuan province, China, Thursday, May 15, 2008. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)
BEIJING - First, the water level in a pond inexplicably plunged. Then, thousands of toads appeared on streets in a nearby province. Finally, just hours before China's worst earthquake in three decades, animals at a local zoo began acting strangely.
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As bodies are pulled from the wreckage of Monday's quake, Chinese online chat rooms and blogs are buzzing with a question: Why didn't these natural signs alert the government that a disaster was coming?
"If the seismological bureau were professional enough they could have predicted the earthquake ten days earlier, when several thousand cubic meters of water disappeared within an hour in Hubei, but the bureau there dismissed it," one commentator wrote.
In fact, seismologists say, it is nearly impossible to predict when and where an earthquake will strike.
Several countries, including China, have sought to use changes in nature — mostly animal behavior — as an early warning sign. But so far, no reliable way has been found to use animals to predict earthquakes, said Roger Musson, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey.
But that has not stopped a torrent of online discussion. Even the mainstream media has chimed in, with an article in Tuesday's China Daily newspaper questioning why the government did not predict the earthquake.
Online commentators say the first sign came about three weeks ago, when large amounts of water suddenly disappeared from a pond in Enshi city in Hubei province, around 350 miles east of the epicenter, according to media reports.
Then, three days before the earthquake, thousands of toads roamed the streets of Mianzhu, a hard-hit city where at least 2,000 people have been reported killed.
Mianzhu residents feared the toads were a sign of an approaching natural disaster, but a local forestry bureau official said it was normal, the Huaxi Metropolitan newspaper reported May 10, two days before the earthquake.
The day of the earthquake, zebras were banging their heads against a door at the zoo in Wuhan, more than 600 miles east of the epicenter, according to the Wuhan Evening Paper.
Elephants swung their trunks wildly, almost hitting a staff member. The 20 lions and tigers, which normally would be asleep at midday, were walking around. Five minutes before the quake hit, dozens of peacocks started screeching.
There are a few possible reasons for such behavior, said Musson, the seismologist. The most likely is that the movement of underground rocks before an earthquake generates an electrical signal that some animals can perceive. Another theory holds that other animals can sense weak shocks before an earthquake that are imperceptible to humans.
Zhang Xiaodong, a researcher at the China Seismological Bureau, said his agency has used natural activity to predict earthquakes 20 times in the past 20 years, but that still represents a small proportion of China's earthquakes.
"The problem now is this kind of relationship is still quite vague," he said.
In winter 1975, Chinese officials ordered the evacuation of the city of Haicheng in northeastern Liaoning province the day before a 7.3 magnitude earthquake, based on reports of unusual animal behavior and changes in ground water levels. Still, more than 2,000 people died. Strange environmental phenomena including changes in well water levels, were also reported a year later before a 7.6 magnitude earthquake in Tangshan in northeastern China that killed 240,000, Musson said.
A team of Chinese seismologists was sent to the region but didn't find any evidence to suggest an earthquake. As the seismologists were going home, they stopped for the night in Tangshan and were killed in the quake.
Whatever. You get the idea.
Or perhaps the owner doesn’t notice when the dog is whiney, jittery, and nervous, unless an earthquake happens afterward.
While it may be true that some animals may sense an oncoming earthquake, using crazy animal behaviour as a reason for evacuating buildings and generally shutting things down until the earthquake or other disaster comes seems to me to be ill advised.
Agreed. Although interesting from a scientific viewpoint, as a practical matter, it is much more sensible to design buildings to tougher standards and withstand an earthquake, predicted or not.
It’s well-established fact that unusual behavior in animals precedes earthquakes. It just isn’t always possible to rule out something other than an earthquake that’s triggering unusual animal behavior, since they’re able to detect lots of things that we can’t. The sudden drop in the pond’s water level should have been a big clue, though. Something has to be going on underground for that to happen.
Yes, they definitely can. I’m aware of a few incidents like these having formerly lived in a region with active tectonic activity. Pets tend to become more withdrawn while wild animals flee the epicenter.
I’m a very rational person but don’t doubt these accounts in the slightest. They seem to be a part of animals’ survival instincts.
Can animals “predict” an earthquake? No. But it seems that they can sense some early signals that are not being detected by people.
I say monitor some animals, like a canary in a coal mine.
The Incas used an interesting combination of interlocking blocks of different shapes to withstand earthquakes
Most folks in China really don’t eat either cats or dogs. It’s mostly a habit of folks in southern China, like Guangdong (Canton) province, where availability of pork and beef was limited. And, because most Chinese emigrating from China over the last 150 years have been from Canton or Fujian, that’s how the stereotype started.
However, during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, when 30 million starved to death, people would eat any animal, whether pigeons, rats, insects, cats or dogs. Red Guards siezed my relatives’ dog in Shanghai and ate it. If that wasn’t bad enough, they forced my relatives to watch.
It’s ironic that there was more trade between the Romans and Chinese in ancient times than between northern and southern Chinese villages. The northerners looked upon the southern diet with some trepidation.
Thank you ... I had forgotten that.
Animals have different sensitivity. Maybe they hear something or smell something in the air. We’re more visual and unless the sky gets weird we probably wouldn’t notice anything.
Did some research online using Ask.com and came upon this PDF about lost pets and earthquakes.
http://www.usc.edu/CSSF/History/2004/Projects/J0617.pdf
Thanks for the link. I have only experienced a small earthquake - 3.2 - but that was frightening enough. Can’t imagine what these people must have endured at 7.9.
One evening in particular, I was out in the middle of the woods, and my dog Timber, usually the calmest, most stable-tempered dog you'd ever meet, seemed to become particularly agitated and excited. About that same time, I felt a little off-balance, and frankly a little buzzed, and the sensation lasted for about 5 minutes...curiously, as my senses returned to normal, my dog returned to his usual demeanor as well. I had no explanation for it, other than possibly we had stumbled across an area of some natural (mushroom spores?) or dumped chemicals that had produced a mildly intoxicating effects.
Anyways, we returned home and went to sleep. The next morning, the radio and TV were all abuzz about the Asian Tsunami and how it had been triggered by at least a 9.0 earthquake.
When we had experienced our moment of disorientation in the woods, I had not looked at my watch or made any conscious note of the time, but based on the start and end times of the walk, and how far into it we were, it would have occurred roughly the same time as the earthquake.
I still ask myself if somehow my dog and I had both "felt" or somehow sensed the earthquake, and of course, I have now of knowing with 100% certitude. It seems to me that it was not an effect of our immediate environment as we'd walked that area numerous times before and since. I've also thought about the possibility that I might have experienced some kind of temporary biochemical imbalance, and my dog had sensed something wrong with me...(it was similar, but not exactly like the slight diziness when you've been resting still for a long time, and get up suddenly), but if that was the case, it has only happened that one time.
They have a much more fine tune sense and can detect danger much faster.
Good point. While larger cities like Shanghai are adopting the International Building Code, more provincial towns still have plenty of substandard structures. In 1979, I watched a five-storey apartment building going up outside Beijing. Although there was reinforcement in the floors and at the columns, the walls were solid clay brick tied in with only mortar.
This recent event was particularly sad because of all the children killed in older school buildings. Most were the product of one-child families. Maybe a few animals in residence while they build new public structures wouldn’t be a bad idea. Certainly can’t hurt.
Yep, just before we have one here in California, my cats and dog go nuts.
247 posted on Friday, April 18, 2008 10:43:43 by Biblebelter (Barry, let your Uncle Jeremiah speak publicly, so he can set the record straight himself.) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 244 | View Replies | Report Abuse]
This is what I posted after last month's earthquake in the Midwest.
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