There has always been widespread interest in possible precursor events before earthquakes. People have long suspected that animals, birds, reptiles, insects - and even plants and humans - pick up something, but in this electronic age there are now reports of unusual malfunctions and interference before earthquakes. This website is based on a survey of about 400 people around Christchurch, New Zealand, who said they noticed unusual pet behaviours and events before the Magnitude 7.1 earthquake in September, 2010. It attempts to separate spurious reports from genuine in a scientific way. Reports and scientific publications based on this survey material are available from this website. These precursor behaviours are thought to be reactions to electric fields generated by Ultra Low Frequency waves generated underground by increasing pressure on rock before large quakes. These results cannot be reliably used for prediction but can provide an alert if numbers of these indicators happen at once.
There are many reports of odd behaviour from household dogs and cats, from disappearance to unusual protectiveness. Owners were woken by pets at rates 12x normal in the hour before the Christchurch quake in 2010. Lost pet reports were more than four times higher than normal the day before.
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Quartz watches stop, hands jerk and reverse, and refrigerators, TVs, and electronic devices have been widely reported to malfunction in unusual ways before earthquakes.
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A statistical test on over 1000 reports of children wakening only minutes before the large 1997 Kobe (at 5.47am) showed they were spread on a radius of 100km from the epicentre and rates were statistically significant.
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There have been reports of unusual phenomena all through the animal kingdom and even in sensitive plants (eg minosa) before earthquakes of Magnitude 6 and over. Earthworms have come to the surface in large numbers before earthquakes - such as in this photo in Taiwan before an M7.7 quake in 1999 and were reported in remarkable numbers in and round Christchurch the day before the quake. These - and other reported phenomena - are discussed in the survey report and attached journal article.
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This deep sea fish - Regalecus - legendarily called the "earthquake" fish is known to surface before large earthquakes.
In Japan catfish are observed to be extremely sensitive to electromagnetic pulses and have been used in earthquake prediction. Eels are also very sensitive to such EM pulses, believed to be created from high pressure on rock.
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