Subject: Jim Berkland The Man Who Predicts Earthquakes.
May 14, 2008.
I consider Jim Berkland to be my personal friend. I
had him on the Community Channel TV that I hosted in
the past, in San Jose, Calif. called Science-Faction.
I was once in his home while Stanton Friedman, the
expert in UFOs was there. Jim and Stanton's wifes are
sisters and Stanton visits and stays in Jim's home
while he is lecturing in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Here is an interview that a person made of Jim
Berkland.
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Interview with James Berkland
James Berkland is a geologist who worked for the
United States Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) from 1973 to
1994. He is well-known for his controversial earthquake
prediction methods that include calculating the number
of missing pets ads in the newspapers of
earthquake-prone areas.
Berkland’s interest in geology began as a child, as
he says his dad was a `rock-hound'. After earning his
BA in Geology at U.C. Berkeley in 1958 he went directly
to work for six years with the U.S. Geological Survey,
involving laboratory and fieldwork throughout the
western United States, including Alaska. Then, after
earning his Masters degree in Geology at San Jose State
University in 1964 he accepted the position of
Engineering Geologist with the U.S. Bureau or
Reclamation, based in Sacramento, and for the next five
years worked on engineering projects involving the
storage and moving of water at a number of dam sites,
tunnels and canals in California and Oregon.
Berkland worked on his Ph.D. in geology at the
University of California at Davis until 1972, and
although he passed his Ph.D. orals, he didn’t complete
his dissertation within the required seven years.
However he published more than 50 scientific papers,
many of which utilized his Ph.D. studies, including a
paper delivered at the International Geological
Congress at Montreal in 1972.
Berkland was Assistant Professor of Geology at
Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina
until 1973, where he shared in the discovery of
evidence for Pleistocene glaciation in the Southern
Appalachians. Berkland then moved backed to California
and worked for the U.S.G.S. for over twenty years. He
was the first County Geologist for the most populous
county in northern California, Santa Clara County.
Besides helping to establish geologic ordinances widely
held as models in the field, Berkland served on many
committees and advisory boards.
He also held a position for two years as an adjunct
professor at San Jose State University, and he received
distinguished member awards from the Santa Clara County
Engineers and Architects Association and the SABER
Society at San Jose State University.
Berkland claims that he can predict earthquakes with
over 75% accuracy by calculating the number of lost pet
ads in the newspaper, and observing the lunar-tide
cycles. He has been meticulously saving and counting
lost pet ads for many years, and he says that the
number of missing dogs and cats goes up significantly
for as long as two weeks prior to an earthquake.
Berkland also noted that many earthquakes occurred at
the time of maximum tidal forces associated with the
twice-monthly alignments of the Sun and Moon. In the
70s he began to make informal predictions, scoring six
out of eight during 1974, including the 5.2M
Thanksgiving Day Quake of November 27th. This one hit
the day after he had predicted it at a meeting of
U.S.G.S. geologists, and it synchronistically shook him
and his daughter while they were attending the movie
Earthquake.
Despite Berkland’s successes in earthquake prediction
he found it almost impossible to publish on the subject
in scientific journals. His career began to suffer
although his credentials included fellow****p in the
Geological Society of America and member****p in the
Association of Engineering Geologists, Earthquake
Engineering Research Institute, American Association
for the Advancement of Science, Sigma Xi Science Honor
Society, Peninsula Geological Society, Seismological
Society of America, and others.
Gravitational variations due to the lunar cycles, he
says, create `seismic windows' of greater earthquake
probability.
When the number of missing pets also suddenly rises,
then a quake is likely to happen. Berkland said he
thinks the U.S.G.S. won’t accept unusual animal
behavior data because it doesn’t fit with their current
scientific paradigm. (Researchers who attempt
earthquake prediction are often lumped into the same
category as fortune tellers and scam artists by
traditional geologists.) It is not surprising then to
hear that Berkland was suspended from his position as
Santa Clara county geologist for claiming to predict
earthquakes--such as the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in
Northern California, which was preceded by numerous
re****ts of odd animal behavior.
When I did the research for Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s
book Dogs That Know When Their Owner’s Are Coming Home,
I set out to replicate Berkland’s findings, and I sat
in the Santa Cruz Public Library for several weeks
counting the Lost Pet ads in the San Jose Mercury News
microfilm collection. I confirmed that Berkland’s
calculations were indeed correct; there was a
significant rise in the number of missing dog and cat
ads in the weeks prior to the 1989 quake. The trouble
was that when I checked the number of missing pet ads
for the year before, during the same time period, there
was also a rise--yet an earthquake didn’t follow the
rise that year. So more counting needs to be done to
determine whether seasonal effects might influence this
phenomenon or not, but it does appear that Berkland is
on to something significant with his method.
Berkland has made many media appearances. He was
interviewed on the Art Bell radio show, and has
appeared on Frontline, Sightings, Strange Universe,
Northwest Afternoon, Town Meeting, Bill Cosby Show, The
Other Side, Two at Noon, Evening Matinee, Jeff Rense
show, George Putnam Show, Mitch Battros Show, Laura Lee
Show, and many other broadcasts. In 1991 he was
featured in the Farmer s Almanac, and his annual
predictions are now published in the Dot Tide Tables.
Berkland also publishes his predictions in a
newsletter called Syzygy, and he maintains Quakeline, a
900-line telephone information service that was
originally nationwide, but is now restricted to the
San Francisco Bay Area. To find out more about
Berkland’s work visit his web site:
www.syzygyjob.com
I interviewed Jim at his home on November 1, 1996,
when he was living in San Jose, California. Jim is a
very friendly guy, and he gets very enthusiastic when
he talks about geology and earthquakes. We spoke about
his career in geology, his methods of earthquake
prediction, and what he thinks the animals are picking
up on that is causing them to disappear prior to
earthquakes.
David: How did you get involved in earthquake
prediction?
James: As a county geologist I came out here in
September of 1973, directly from Appalachian State
University, where I was a Assistant Professor for a
year. But I'm a native Californian, raised in the Bay
Area. I was born down in Glendale, but we moved to
Somoma Valley when I was six years old.
David: How did you first become interested in
geology?
Why don't we start with that.
James: Well, my dad was a rock hound, and I was
brought up in the country, with animals and hikes,
hunting and fi****ng all around there. I'd see different
terrain, and pick up rocks, different pretty rocks,
stick them in the pocket. My dad was interested in lots
of things, and was frustrated in a number of ways. He
was an electrician, a store-keeper, and never had gone
to colleges. He almost started in medicine, but didn't
continue in it.
I went directly from high school to a local Santa
Rosa Junior College.
Then I was going to work for six months and earn
money to go to Berkeley in forestry, but it turned into
almost six years. I worked at the biggest industry in
Sonoma County, which is Sonoma State Hospital for the
mentally retarded. I almost didn't get out of there. It
was handy, only a mile a way from where I lived, and I
had kind of a pleasing job. It was like having Boy
Scout troop. I would take the kids up in the hills for
hikes and things.
Of course, my colleagues there were tickled, because
suddenly instead of 120 kids on the ward, there would
have maybe 75 or less. It was a lot easier to handle
while I was away for four or five hours. I would pack
the kids lunches, and go up and fish up at the creeks.
We'd look at the wildlife, and turn over rocks to see
what's underneath. So I finally I decided there's got
to be a little more.
I'm trained for more than this. It was easy, but it
wasn't challenging, and there was so "many things that
I was interested in, but couldn't seem to follow up on.
So I went down to become a forester.
Part 1.
John Winston. johnfw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jim Berkland The Man Who Predicts Earthquakes.
Part 2. May 15, 2008.
I have been told how to contact Jim Berkland by one
of my friends. I contacted him, he wrote me back
a nice e-mail and I sent him the information about
the toads reqarding the Chinese earthquake.
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When I got to Berkeley in the middle of Spring
semester it turned out that I'd already received all of
the prerequisites for upper division, and there were no
more courses available to me, without taking the
forestry field camp, involved in measuring logs, timber
country, and working in a logging mill. So I said,
well, what does that pay,?
Well, no, they said, you pay us. It costs you $200. I
said, no, next summer I've got to work again. Well,
sorry you can't take any upper division cl***** until
you've had this summer field camp. Well, my buddy was
taking geology at Berkeley, and he said, we don't have
to have our geology field camp until the end of our
senior year. So because all of the prerequisites were
identical I just ****fted right into geology, and never
looked back. After two years at Berkeley I went
directly to the U.S.G.S., where I worked as a
non-professional for almost six years, maybe a little
over, during 1958 to 1964.
David: Had you earned your Ph.D.?
James: No, I just had a bachelors. I thought, well,
I'll just work at the U.S.G.S., work my way up, show
them what I can do, gradually become a geologist, and
go from there.
Well, it turned out, it didn't work that way. To get
with the U.S.G.S. you pretty much had to have a Ph.D.,
except under times of national emergency or something,
when they hired a few people with bachelors during the
uranium boom because they needed feet to go out there
and walk around.
But there was no way that I could advance. I could
have worked as a technician for my whole life there. So
I went back to school, got my master's at San Jose
State, and then just after I'd completed that suddenly
the offers began coming. I could be going to the State
Water department, or Bureau of Reclamation. Then the
U.S.G.S. wanted me possibly to go up on an ice island
by myself for six months, just to make bottom
measurements on arctic ice flow, check their
radioactivity, and atmosphere-- just read instruments
all by myself, until the ice got cold enough in August
or September to freeze up and they could land the
plane.
Well, anyway all these things came down, but I had
made a decision and signed up with the US Bureau of
Reclamation as a professional engineer and geologist. I
worked with them for over five years, in dams, tunnels,
and canals in Oregon and California mainly. At this
time came the revolution in Earth Sciences-- the plate
tech tectonic in evolution. But from all of my courses
through Santa Rosa Junior College, Cal Berkeley, and
San Jose State, plate tectonics was just a figment of
the imagination. It was just coincidental-- that word I
hear all the time-- that it looks like you could fit
South America and Africa together. There's no
mechanism. It's just some wild idea from this German
geographer, who is not even a geologist. So what's he
know about this continental drift?
So it was laughter that was associated with the
theory. My professor would always talk about it, show
the map, and ha ha. You know, there's this idea some
geographer believed, but it really doesn't make any
sense. We'd have to change our whole understanding
geology developed over the last 200 years if we were to
accept this. Well, so be it. But they didn't accept it
until the late 60's after notable conference at
Monterey, where they brought geologists from all around
the world. They now had space-age data, bottom -of -
the-sea data, new fossil data, and it all began to
jive. They realized that we're not all little islands;
everything in it connects at some point. The unified
theory of geology developed at that meeting in 1969.
Well, it was too much for me to avoid anymore. I'd
been getting little glimpses of this from talking to
people, and seeing things in the paper, or the
Geological Society Bulletin. But when I last left the
U.S.G.S. in 1964 they didn't buy it at all. There was
no such thing as continental drift. Movement of the
magnetic pool might explain things, not the movement of
continents- So that also added fuel to my
understanding, with light to my understanding about
seismic windows.
David: How did you get interested-involved in
earthquake prediction?
James: I came out from deciding I wasn't going to
spend the rest of my life back on the east coast, when
all of my previous life was here. I told my wife don't
bother to come back with the little daughter, because
I'm coming back to California. So I came, without a
job.
We'd taken a tour around the country, and after we'd
got back to my mother's place up in Sonoma County,
there was a little postcard from San Jose's County. Mr.
Berkland, if you're still interested in this job you
might come for an interview.
I had flown out to take the orals in February of 73,
by then in June my appointment was over back there, and
they wanted me to come back. I said, no, I'm going back
to California. We had a couple of possibilities, but
they dwindled. And I hadn't heard from the county. So
here's this postcard-- if you're really interested,
call us by August 31st, and this is like September 2nd.
So not to leave any stone unturned I called up the
county engineer, and I said, well, I just back from the
east coast, and I'm available now if that position is
still open. Yeah, c'mon down. I'll prompt you.
So next day I come down and talk to him, and three
days later I'm County Geologist, the first one for
Santa Clara County, the first one in Northern
California ever. They had most of the major counties in
Southern California, and they have their own staff of
County Geologists. But not here, and there was a crying
need for one, because of the geologic hazards, the
landslides and earthquake problems, and subsidence
developing under the Santa Clara Valley. So for the
first few months I was interested- through the
earthquakes I felt, and several others that had been
re****ted to me in the Bay Area-- but not until January
8th. 1974. after I'd been there for six months, did it
all begin to jive.
I saw an article in the newspaper that we might
expect local flooding around the San Francisco Bay due
to an unusual astronomical alignment. I got out my
almanacs. (I've always been an almanac buff.) Say, what
is this? First full moon of the year on January 8th was
on the same day as the closest perigee in about eight
years. And the two events were only an hour and a half
apart. Very unusual for them. What I call
"synchronaity", that close together; between the
syzygy-- the lining up-- and the perigee- closest
approach. That was causing extreme tides. Also, it was
just a week after the closest approach of the earth and
the sun, the perihelia, that happens once a year, in
through January.
So that combination was close to the conditions of
January 4th, 1912, when we had the maximum force in 600
years. This was the maximum force in several years. And
I thought, huh, if the ocean waters are being pulled up
and down by the gravity, and the earth is sort of
rotating underneath the bulge of water and high tide.
Then six hours later it's over here where there's a
deficiency of water, and then six hours later it's down
under here, another bulge. So that's why you have two
high and two low tides a day.
I didn't understand all that, really. I didn't have
the geometry that clear. In fact, I wasn't really sure
what the difference between a new moon and full moon
was. All I knew was they were lined up. The clearest
analogy is that if the moon is rising just as the sun
is setting, that's when you have the full face of the
moon lit up. like the sun's a big flashlight. So you
see the full moon, but if the moon is up here at the
zenith, when the sun is rising or setting, it's obvious
you don't see the whole face of the moon. You can only
see the part that's near the moon.
So that's full moon. When the moon rises and the
sun's setting, that's best you can do. And you might
even get an eclipse, and that's a perfect syzygy. I
love the solar eclipse. I've seen three, and I expect
to see another one in February of 98. I went down to
the Galapagos Islands, and up into the Caribbean. It'll
be a beautiful total eclipse, lasting over four
minutes. We saw the ones in Mexico in 91, and I flew
down to Peru in 94 and saw the one there. The first one
I saw with my daughter back in 79, with the last one to
hit the United States, 48 states. There won't be
another one here until 2017. I hope I'm still here.
David: How did you notice that the association
between this and earthquakes?
James: Okay, so I said, hey if that's causing the
ocean tides to go up, maybe the solid earth has a tide
in it. Indeed it does, about three feet.
Part 2.
John Winston. johnfw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jim Berkland Man Who Predicts Earthquakes.
Part 3. May 16, 2008.
This shows how animals act before a very large
earthquake.
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I didn't know about it at the time. Well, if the
earth is bulging up and down, maybe that's limbering up
the fault lines. And if they're meta-stable-ready to
fail-- this little extra stress of the movement of the
earth, the undulation, underneath this gravitational
stress, might trigger the fault into action. So I said,
hmm, we've had six quakes here-- the day of the full
moon, two days after the full moon, on the day of
perigee, six days after the new moon and perigee.
All six quakes that hit the Bay Area from my arrival
there in September until January 8th confirmed this
wild idea. So I thought, well, if it continues like
this, we should have a quake within the next week. I
told the folks around the office that there was likely
to be a quake around here in the next few days. They
said, how big? Well, these others were mainly 3's and
low 4's, and since this is even a higher tidal force,
probably a 4 to a 5. Two days later 4.4 hit down in
Buellor, and I said to myself, boy, this is simple.
What's so tough about predicting quakes? Why isn't
everyone using this method? I still don't know why
everybody isn't using it.
When I went to Peru in November of 74, 94, our
Peruvian of Inca descent said after the eclipse, I am
so happy you were able to see our eclipse. We in Peru
have a tradition we watch the eclipse, and then we wait
for the earthquake. I said, would you say that again
for my video camera, please? Totally caught me by
surprise- my idea, maintained by the Incas. So I had an
interview with her for like ten minutes with the video
camera. No doubt, they could see the relation****p. She
said, what's unusual is that we already had the quake.
Koosco shook with a 4 magnitude quake, three hours
after the moment of totality, she said. Usually it
takes a day or so, and it's possibly bigger.
The next day a 6.2 hit Peru, and there was no quakes
as strong for the first half of November. The strongest
quake in the world occurred the day after the total
eclipse, which lasted about four and a half minutes.
The one in Mexico lasted six minutes, and there was no
announced Mexican quake. But there was a Peruvian quake
on that same day, even though there only saw a partial
eclipse.
David: So this gave you some additional confirmation
that you were onto something.
James: Yeah, time and again. I mean, if you go into
the computer and ask for all the literature showing
earthquakes and tides, over three hundred titles come
up. So when a re****ter goes from me to the U.S.G.S. or
to Berkeley, and they say, oh no, we don't sup****t what
Berkland's doing. There's no evidence, no correlation-
it just shows they are blindly ignorant of the world
literature. They're just ignorant of it, and so I no
longer consider it my problem. I think it's their
problem. They're not looking at the evidence, and I see
it time and again. There's John Mack, Galileo,
whatever. If your idea doesn't match the ruling theory,
the mainstream opinion, there's something wrong with
you. So we have to have legislation, and off with his
head.
David: According to Thomas Kuhn novel approaches tend
to appeal to younger scientists, people in graduate
school, whereas the older establishment, which has more
invested in the past, is less open to new ideas.
James: Yes, so I've had a lot of good advice. My old
mentor with U.S.G.S. said, Jim, you know you probably
will never convince your severest critics. Your goal
should be to outlive them, or have your ideas outlive
them. And I've been so pleased because I have been
doing this since 74 with. My first couple years I kept
it under wraps because I valued my scientific
reputation. I didn't want to be iconoclast really. I
want to do my work, try to increase public safety on
geological matters, and try to resolve differences
between property owners in area or between different
scientific branches, and try to bring the Santa Clara
County up to speed. So with my work in the U.S.G.S., my
friends there, a lot of friends with the California
division of Mines and Geology and the Bureau of
Reclamation, I really felt needed. And for the first
fifteen years with the county I had hit my ultimate
niche. Everyday I was was excited to get up, and was
ready to go, thinking, what's today going to bring?
David: You'd been predicting earthquakes since 1974,
but this was primarily with tides and the moon. You
hadn't gotten interested in animals or the lost pet ads
yet?
James: No, not until 79, after five years. A lot of
things happened in 79. One thing I learned of was a
U.S.G.S. study that lasted four years, taking
predictions from numerologists, astrologers, psychics,
dreamers, whatever the source, and filing their
predictions. This is because they were being troubled
by having to answer all these wild ideas that people
come up and say, okay, there's going to be a quake
that's going to destroy Los Angeles. California is
going to slide into the sea. The last days of the great
state of California. That was called "The Book". Then
for several years it really disturbed the U.S.G.S.,
because they had to answer all these people that read
the book and loved it as gospel truth.
o, they decided, let's establish a track record,
which is the way to go. Take all of these people, and
say they're predicting. Okay, what did you say last
time? How come you missed that one? Why should we
believe you know? Good approach, that's great. So I
heard about this, and I sent my predictions into them,
with the newspaper articles and everything. And they
were trying to get me, while I was out in the field a
number of days, and they finally got through to me, and
they said, Jim, Jim, the computer spit out your name,
you've got the 99th percentile level, which means
there's only one chance in a hundred that what you're
doing is accidental.
But we think you've been lucky you know. Keep on
predicting and you fall back in the grass with the rest
of them. I said, well, gee that's good news.
Well, so fine, but if you tell some media person I
told you this I'll deny it. And that didn't bother me
too much either, because you know this is kind of
informal, and okay at least I'm achieving something
that caught his attention, and I'm sure they're going
to do something with this.
When they closed the program about a year later I
read in the summary that no one had achieved the 99th
percentile level, and no scientist had even bothered to
submit a prediction. I quickly called him. I said Roger
Hunter at the U.S.G.S. in Golden, Colorado. Roger, how
could you say that nobody hit the 99th percentile? I
know you told me not to tell the media, but I hit it.
And how could you say no scientist even bothered to
submit a prediction? I'm a fellow in the Geological
Society, and I'm a scientist. I published over 55
papers, and had responsible positions.
Well, yeah, that was a little wrong, he said. I meant
to say that an insufficient number of scientists
submitted predictions to make it statistically
meaningful. Well, that is certainly is far different
from saying none had done it, or none had hit 99th
percentile. He said, well, we'll probably correct that
in the final version or something. He never did.
The same thing happened when I joined Earthquake
Watch at SRI under contract with the U.S.G.S. to see if
they could reproduce what the Chinese had done. Before
the Haichang earthquake they had a system there, of
maybe a hundred thousand peasants measuring water
levels, checking radon with it's film exposure,
measuring little tilt-meters, doing simple things. So
they just day after day said, oh little tilt in the
ground here. Or they would see where the patterns of
earthquakes were. And animals especially-- farm
animals, wild animals, pets. And because of the
ac***ulation of data just before March 3, 1975 they
evacuated the city of Haichang of about 100,000 people.
They had lectures on communism, and had tents and
blankets and things up on the hill.
David: They evacuated everybody on the basis of what?
James: Mainly animals.
David: What did they notice?
James: There was water-level changes. There was radon
gas sudden increase. There was a pattern of small
earthquakes in an area where they hadn't had big
earthquakes before, and suddenly they stopped.
Meanwhile the zoo animals were pacing back and forth.
The birds were crying. Turtles made noises, like they
were shrieking. Fish were jumping out of the aquarium.
I've got the complete listing. I have probably a dozen
or two different things. The pheasants were crying at
night, and would not sleep on the ground like they
normally would do. The common thread, what I actually
have never seen anyone else even mention, but it's
quite clear in all these re****ts-- is that animals try
to leave their normal places of security prior to an
earthquake, on first awareness of an earthquake, which
sounds weird.
Why don't they go into security? Well, some do, but
those are not considered anomalous. If a cat jumps on
your lap and wants to be petted, that's not as
interesting as if he jumps up on top of the shelves,
leaps to the TV, knocks things down, and just runs
around the house like he's crazy. If he runs off, and
gets hit by a car or something, people say that's
unusual. There are many aspects of it.
Part 3.
John Winston. johnfw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jim Berkland The Man Who Predicts Earthquakes.
Part 4. May 17, 2008.
After having Jim on the the Community Channel TV
show called Science-faction that I used to host, a
lady gave me a personal telephone call. She said
that she didn't think much of most of the things I
talked about on the show but she demanded that I give
a personal telephone call just prior to the time that
Jim Berkland was going to come on my show because she
liked hearing from him.
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So you say why do they run away? Why don't they head
for some kind of security?
Well, look what people do. When the ground begins to
shake, if we suddenly get rocked here, really like a
repeat of Loma Prieta, we're not going to want to stay
in here and take a chance that it's going to topple
over on us. We're really going to be startled. Books
are going to start bouncing. The refrigerator may hop
across the floor.
Things are falling. Noise all over the place. You
hear the swimming pool out here, which we filled in,
because it lost about four feet of water out of that.
Some people lost more than that, so you want to get
outside, away from what is normally your place of
security, your office, your home. The tendency is to
get me out of here, so we rely on instinct instead of
natural thought processes.
David: What do you think it is the animals are
picking up on?
James: I am very confident that the major phenomena
that they are detecting is a change in the magnetic
field. I didn't know by what means they were detecting
it.
David: Why do you think that?
James: When Antonio Nefaradi first called me,
interrupting my dinner, I said, how long you been doing
this? And he says since April, and now this is
September. Well, how long in advance? A week to ten
days in advance they seem to run away, and then show up
in the Lost and Found column. And when he said that,
suddenly the light flashed on. A lot of my skepticism
began to recede, because six days before the 5.9 quake
at Coyote Lake on August 6, 1979, six days before on my
birthday, July 31st, our cat Rocky disappeared. We'd
had him for about two years. He never had never run
away before, but he was gone. I thought, gee he's been
hit by car or something. I didn't even think about
putting an item in the paper. I didn't even bother
putting a poster up. I asked a few of the neighbors if
they'd seen Rocky. No, nobody had. And the quake
happened, six days later- the strongest quake in the
Bay Area since 1911.
And I didn't associate it with the earthquake until a
month later when Antonio called me, and suddenly I
could just picture the light bulb over my head. Well,
Rocky followed this outlandish hypothesis, that the
animals ran away, and Rocky never appeared as a Lost
and Found item. But twelve other cats showed up in the
paper's Lost and Found. The normal was two or three at
that time, and suddenly it was twelve- the most he'd
ever seen in watching this for six months. So that made
me think that a lot of other cats didn't show up in the
paper either, and maybe there was something to this.
For the few months I would look at the Lost and Found
column much as you would look at the horoscope. You
know, I don't believe stuff, I just want to see what it
says, and there were no significant quakes. Then on the
20th of January, 1980, following the 79 quake, I got a
call early in the morning from my daughter who was just
about to head for high school. Daddy, Rocky's home. Six
months he'd been gone. I picture this poor emaciated
scrawny cat crawling in out of the woods or something.
He was sleek and fat,. Somebody had taken excellent
care of him. But he'd fled that veritable paradise four
days before the next five magnitude quake in the Bay
Area.
It didn't matter which home he was living in, he fled
it prior to the two biggest quakes since 1911.
And when I came home Rocky was there. He stayed
around home for one month, and then disappeared on the
20th of February, two days before the strongest
February shake in the Bay Area. So we haven't seem him
since. Not likely to, but he fit the pattern. And from
that point on I became a believer, and daily, the first
thing I turned to in the paper, was the Lost and Found
Column.
And I was startled this morning to see 21 missing
cats, the most in one year. That probably means a
significant quake within three weeks.
David: When you make a prediction, what are all the
different factors that you take into account?
James: Basically, I look at the tides. So I have this
tide calendar. I have the almanacs, and I get the
calendars that show the daily fluctuations of the tides
in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Of course,
they're mostly peaked at the same day, although the
amplitude of the tide varies tremendously as you go
north. Here the normal tide is between four and four
and a half feet, between high and low for a single day,
the same as Los Angeles. But up in Seattle the normal
tide's about eight or nine feet, and the peak tide's
around sixteen or seventeen feet.
Here the peak tides are eight or night feet, and in
Alaska the high tide is thirty feet, instead of the
normal fifteen or twenty. And, of course, in the Bay of
Fundy, where my wife was born, 55 foot tide.
So back in 1962, I'd just been at this like three
years with the animals. I noticed we were going to have
a 8.9 foot tide on the ninth of January, the highest
I've ever seen. Year after year, the highest would be
8.4, 8.5, next year it's going to 8.3, so 8.9 is a
tremendous tide.
I expected we'd have a quake around here during that
seismic window, and we didn't. But back in New
Brunswick on the next Bay of Fundy they had a 5.9, the
strongest in 126 years.
And that previous one was a time of extremely high
tide. In fact, it was covered in the world literature
on tides.
So that summer we went back to visit my wife's folks,
and I stopped off at the university. We were in a
window there, and I was noticing the seismograph in the
university hall suddenly began to bang and bang.
It was a 7.0 magnitude quake in Panama, and I
predicted that the world would see a 7 during that
period. Normally you get one 7 a month. So if you have
an 8 day period, you have a one in four chance of being
right that hit the seven.
So I called the Geology Department, and the geologist
came down to talk me. I said, how do you do? I'm a
geologist from California, and I have an idea about
timing of earthquakes in general, and yours in
particular. And, he said, well, it was on the day of
this 55 foot tide in the Bay of Fundy, the day of an
eclipse of the moon, and these extra stresses from the
tide forces we think triggered a weak place in the
fault. I said, well, congratulations, that's my same
idea. I'd wish you'd come to California and talk to
some of my colleagues.
David: So that's what you think is happening. That
there's a weak point along the faults that's just
waiting to happen, and then when the extra
gravitational pull comes, it gives it that extra ****ge
to just push it into action.
James: Yes. My clearer picture involves three
factors. One is the pure fluction of this island earth
up and down about three feet under the full moon. We're
pulled up about three feet higher. The earth is about.
three feet greater in diameter. Maybe it's six feet, on
either side. But anyway on one side of the earth it's
about three feet higher than it was at low tide when
the moon's rising or setting. So just that fluction may
cause a change. Also the ocean tide is coming in and
out. Every foot of water adds a load to the earth's
crust of about one million tons per square mile.
So if you've got six hundred square miles of it the
San Francisco Bay in the delta, and every six hours it
comes in, six hundred times. Say it's an eight foot
tide, between high and low, a change of 8 X 600 X one
million tons-- tremendous ****ft of load. And boat-lines
are parallel to the coast, and a tide comes on.
And it's on this block, and then it's on the block in
back there.
It's a relatively fast period. It's like taking a
wire between your fingers, especially copper, and you
wiggle and wiggle it, until somewhere around wiggle ten
and twenty, you get a quick friction, and you get the
metal taking a pop.
David: How do you see the relation****p between that
and what you think the animals are picking up-- which
you think is a change in the magnetic field-- as being
related?
James: Almost any rock on earth is going to have some
magnetite in it--spirel magnetic metal, the most
highly magnetic natural substance on earth. If you are
panning for gold, most of the black sand is magnetite--
it could be chromite, franklinite or some of the
spinels, which are the most magnetic materials. But
they're also dense, and very resistant. So that's why
they end up in the dregs at the bottom along with gold.
The gold is quite a bit heavier, but the sand-- after
you wash away most the quartz and the felsbar, the
micas and these layer things, you got these real dense
ferrel-magnetic minerals in the bottom.
So you could run a magnet in gold pan and it'll pull
away all this magnetic material. And if you're lucky
you have a little ring of gold underneath that's not
magnetic. So if you have a rock, and you put it in a
compressor in the laboratory, and you have a magnet
nearby, it will change its magnetic properties under
stress. And if you heat or cool it, the same thing.
Part 4.
John Winston. johnfw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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