Jim Birkland, a retired California geologist with 75%+ earthquake prediction accuracy, ties seismic risks to syzygies—sun-moon-Earth alignments—warning of a 3.5-6 magnitude quake near Los Angeles, San Jose, and Seattle by July 6, 1996, amid extreme tides from a blue moon and lunar perigee. He cites animal behavior (missing pets, whale strandings) and human symptoms like pineal-gland headaches as precursors, dismissing planetary theories while criticizing USGS failures like Parkfield’s missed quake. Birkland highlights thrust faults’ hidden dangers, such as Northridge’s 1994 damage to steel-and-concrete buildings, and urges private schools to update seismic safety beyond the Field Act’s public-school mandate. His predictions, rooted in tidal forces and historical patterns, suggest California’s fault lines remain unpredictable despite official reassurances, leaving residents vulnerable to underreported risks. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning as the moon pulls full this weekend from the Hawaiian and Tahitian Island chains eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north to the Pole, and worldwide on the internet.
I've received facts after facts and phone call and email.
And where's Jim Birkland?
Well, that's who I've got for you tonight, Jim Birkland.
He is a California geologist.
Actually, a fascinating, fascinating guy.
And I'm going to read you the facts that I received, the email actually last night from Jim.
Art, I would be pleased to be on your show anytime.
This summer can't miss for the West Coast terrestrial tingles.
That's in quotes, terrestrial tingles.
The word earthquake frightens, he says, some people enough, so they wanted me fired after naming and predicting the World Series quake.
I was allowed to return to my job as county geologist after two and a half months of suspension after promising, quote, not to predict any more earthquakes on county time, end quote.
We'll find out whether he's on county time right now in a minute.
That's when I began my monthly newsletter.
He is a fascinating guy, a geologist, a predictor of earthquakes.
He is Jim Birkland, and I'll tell you something, folks.
We are entering a particularly interesting time in about an hour.
I think it's in about an hour.
Jim will tell you all about it.
So coming up in a moment, Jim Berkland, geologist extraordinaire.
One, everybody's been asking to see a photograph of my crazy wild cat comet.
Comet, in what we call the pinky slink position, is now to be viewed on my webpage as of about an hour ago.
Comet's picture for the first time is up there.
So those of you who wanted to see Comet, there you go.
In addition on my webpage, I'm going to give you two reasons to go to the webpage tonight.
Though Jim Birkland does not have a webpage of his own, my webmaster, Keith Rowland, has located several references to Jim Birkland in earthquake areas of the internet, and there are appropriate links up there now.
So if you want to find out more about Jim Birkland, you can do that also on the webpage.
So myCat Comet and Jim Birkland, not necessarily in that order, up on my webpage, which is www.artbell.com.
I have in front of me the Who's Who in Science and Engineering Third Edition Award given to James Birkeland.
And those included in this award, Actually, limited, those limited to receiving this award are those individuals who have demonstrated outstanding achievement in their own fields of endeavor and who have thereby contributed significantly to the betterment of contemporary society.
And then in 1989, one week exactly after the World Series earthquake, they called me into a person-to-person conference and they said, Jim, because of your recent pronouncements, I'm very troubled.
I want you to go home for a few days and not speak to the media about earthquakes.
In this case, things were piling up to such a degree, I had to get the word out because I felt that people needed to be informed, just like if you saw some funnel clouds beginning to drop.
That was introduced to me back in 1979 by a physicist with Xerox who called me up while I was home eating and he said, Mr. Birkeland, you know, I've been following your predictions and I agree with you with your upcoming seismic window because the cats are disappearing again.
And I said, what?
He said, yes, I look at the lost and found column in the local paper and I see it lengthens just before local quakes.
Well, I almost hung up on him because I'm a scientist, you know, and this was so outlandish and I've weathered many outlandish ideas and suggestions from others.
But this one threw me until suddenly it's like I really had that light bulb sort of appear over my head.
Our cat, Rocky, had disappeared six days before the strongest quake since 1911.
And I hadn't associated him disappearing with the earthquake that followed, the 5.9, August 6, 1979.
But I had mailed on August 2nd a letter to the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver predicting that between the 7th and 14th we would have such a quake.
And then they said, if you tell some media person I told you this, I'll deny it.
And he has been true to his word.
And I didn't get it in writing.
When they issued their final report on this, so they were taking predictions from numerologists and astrologers and dreamers and anyone that wanted to file a prediction.
And when they came out with their final report, they said no one achieved the required 99 percentile level, and no scientist even bothered to submit a prediction.
So I called him up immediately, and I said, I'm not chopped liver.
I'm a fellow in the Geological Society and a member of half a dozen other scientific groups.
I've published more than 50 scientific papers, so I am a scientist.
And he said, Well, what I really meant to say was that an insufficient number of scientists had filed predictions to make it statistically meaningful.
Well, we had the highest tidal force in three years on October 14th, 1989.
We had the full moon and the closest approach of the moon in three years, only three hours apart.
And the exact same thing happened back in 1865 on October 4th.
And October 8th, 1865, a seven-magnitude quake hit the San Andreas Fault near Loma Prieta.
And so with the same conditions developing, I could see the probabilities were there at the start of the year.
And I issued a little pamphlet saying that between the 14th and 21st, there was an 80% chance that there would be a 3.5 to 6 magnitude quake, or 5.5 magnitude at the top.
And then just before that critical period, instead of seeing four or five missing cats in the paper, there were 27.
I mean, it was a whole different universe looking in there.
Instead of a three-inch column of lost and found, it was 12 inches long.
Well, I think they rely upon the Earth's magnetic field for navigation.
And that's how these dogs and cats will come 1,000 miles home.
You take them away and they come back.
That's not magic.
And that's how the whales and dolphins travel and migrate thousands of miles north-south along the Pacific coast, you know.
In fact, Dr. Kirschmink at UCLA has his hypothesis is that they travel in magnetic troughs.
And if you just follow that up, you say, aha, if this magnetic trough, which is going mainly north-south, should be diverted, it should get anomalous and lead onto a beach, then up come the whales and the dolphins and beach themselves.
And if you go out and turn them around, they come back up again.
Yeah, we had Humphrey in the bay.
The last time he came into San Francisco Bay was in October of 1990.
And he got stuck on the mud at Candlestick Park, and they spent a couple of days keeping him wet and throwing lines around and finally towed him off.
And the beautiful picture of him waving his flukes goodbye to San Francisco.
We are not as much in touch with these primitive, I think they're primitive senses that animals have, but we too are animals, and so people, some people anyway, feel these things, don't they?
Yes, and it's funny, I used to find it much easier to accept that animals could detect these things, and then I started getting calls from people, especially the people with headaches.
Now, nine separate people have called me and they say, well, we've heard you do with animals, but don't let this get around.
But I get these terrible headaches.
And they start three or four days in advance of a local quake.
And I tell my family about it, and they laugh and then make fun of me.
And then, just a few hours or a few minutes before the quake itself, the pain and pressure disappear.
And that's when I know the quake is imminent.
I get the same story again and again.
And the first two such stories came, first one in 1982 and the next one in 1986.
And in between, exactly halfway between, there was a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco and they announced for the first time the discovery of the mineral magnetite in the human body.
And it's right between the eyebrows where this pain, this headache is centered.
And that's where the pineal gland is.
And that's where the mystical third eye is supposed to be.
And where the Indian ladies paint the red spot.
There's a lot going on there that we don't understand.
And they even detected it in the spring water in Japan before the big quake there in January 17th last year on the day of the full moon in January of 95.
And the reports finally begin to gather.
They wanted one way to check on the old water, but they hadn't been doing it, see, monitoring it.
So they just got the bottled water that had dates on it, uncapped it, and analyzed each bottle in sequence and found the radon peaked out about a week before the big quake.
And then they've been also talking about a connection lately, a geological connection to, I know it sounds strange, but to the upper atmosphere, and they've been tracking these pulses of energy that go way out into the upper atmosphere during a lightning storm.
And then people kind of say, well, Jim, you're only giving us four or five or six seismic windows per year, and I want to plan this trip or plan washing in the upper windows of my two-story apartment or something.
What's happening next month?
So I begin to give the best window for each month.
And so I don't just deal with the cream at the top.
I deal with the best window of each month, and that has made my average drop.
My window runs from midnight tonight to midnight on the 6th of July.
An eight-day window.
It always is.
It usually opens the day before the newer full moon, but it can open up to three days before, depending on what the tides show me.
So if anyone gets hold of the latest 1996 DOT tide book that goes free at Sporting Goods stores, they'll see a couple of pages about me and my methods in there.
It's quite surprising to look in there and see, oh, seismic windows, and they have identified them for each month.
And, for example, in May, it was quite an ordinary month, tide-wise.
The moon and the perigee were some four days apart, and so the tides reached no higher than 7.3 feet at the Golden Gate, the difference between a high and low on a single day.
But then in June, on June 2nd, we had an 8.3-foot range, and it gradually declined from that.
And on that day, we had a 7.0 magnitude quake in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
We hadn't had a major quake, a 7 or better, since April.
All of May, we didn't get a 7.
And then we got that one on the 2nd, and on the 9th, a 7.7 in ADAC, and the 10th, 7.2 in ADAC, 11th, 7.2 in the Philippines, San Mar Island, and on the 17th, a 7.5 or 8 by one reading, and the Flores Sea.
It's gone beyond scorn to real resentment and anger in some cases.
One of my erstwhile colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey, I went to a session they had on April 18th.
It was commemorating the April 18th, 1906 big one.
Yes.
And just as I came in the door, I heard that they had a quake.
Well, it happened to be the second day of my April seismic window.
And I was wanting to hear about some quakes.
We hadn't had any for several weeks.
And they said, we just had one.
And it turned out to be a 3.7.
Although the first report was a 3.1, which was below my minimum of 3.5, and so I was a little disappointed.
So we went into the meeting, and there they flashed up on the screen, 3.8, and I burst out, all right.
People suddenly looked at me and wondered why I said, well, yes, I predicted at least a 3.5, so that one made it.
And then the beeper went off on the speaker's beeper, and he said, oh, it looks like we've had a little more seismic activity.
We'll show you how this new rapid call-up feature works on our computer.
So he plugged away, and all of a sudden his computer crashed because everybody was calling in at the same time.
And after 20 minutes, they was able to get through to his own station there, and it turned out to be a 4.7, the strongest in three years in the Bay Area.
So that was quite pleasing to me because my range was a 3.5 to 5.5, and it was right in the middle.
And so I saw this bearded geologist who is actually the one responsible for nearly having me fired.
He gave some misinformation to the state geologist.
So I saw him walking down the hall, and so I gave him a big smile, and I said, Al, would you like a copy of my newsletter?
I predicted the quake we just had.
He looked stonelily ahead and shoved this to one side, and he says, I don't want to deal with that.
And the reason I mentioned Charles Watson is because Charles Watson is, for earthquakes, what I suspect you are, the equivalent of a tornado chaser.
And when he was on the air with me, I asked him, if you knew there was going to be a five-point earthquake in a certain place, and you really knew where the exact epicenter was going to be, would you go and stand on the epicenter?
Okay, I was 20 miles away from the epicenter of the 7.1 World Series quake.
And that's the only quake that ever frightened me.
But ironically, I was just heading out the door.
I was on the seventh floor of the county building here in Santa Clara County in San Jose.
And most of the staff had already left to dash home and watch the game.
And at three minutes after five, I started out, and then I saw the phone, and I said, well, maybe I'll just check with the Berkeley seismographic station to see if my quake has happened yet.
It could have been a five off the end of the county, and I might have missed it.
So I dialed up the numbers, and I was within one or two digits of getting through when the quake struck.
And then I didn't want it because the tiles were undulating and I was crashing all my rock collection and the books in the library tumbling out and the whole floor was shaking and a giant microfilm reader slammed against me and I kept it from sliding on the floor and I was moving back and forth on the counter and my first comment was to anyone that was still left, we've got a major quake here.
In fact, after the Landers earthquake in 1992, they changed their plans.
In fact, it was delightful to me.
Just minutes after the Landers earthquake, there began to be a series of earthquakes in volcanic centers such as Mammoth Lake and Yellowstone and Lassen and Shasta.
And there was absolutely no mistaking the pattern.
They were triggered by the effect of this Landers earthquake hundreds of miles away.
Of course, just 50 miles away was the Big Bear quake, 6.8.
If you had a dump truck with the sand in there filled up at the angle of repose, about 34 degrees, and it's all tilted up and it isn't sliding yet, and say a fellow on a motorcycle hits it from the side.
It disturbs the equilibrium there.
And it will cause that whole mass to start to slide out of the truck, even though the movement wasn't in the direction of the tilt of the sand, the maximum slope.
As of about 10 minutes ago, we are in the biggest earthquake window of the year.
Blue moon time, magnetic influences, the full moon coming up, tidal influences, and lots of other things.
My guest is Jim Birkland, a retired California geologist, who has predicted many, many quakes and rates what he is predicting now in the 85 percentile range, and we'll repeat those predictions in just a moment.
I just received a earthquake alert bulletin from our mutual friend Charles Watson, and it looks another geologist, and it looks very much like there has just been, just now, a 5.9 preliminary magnitude earthquake near the coast of New Guinea.
All right, well, the Bay Area is online now, so let's repeat the basic window information: what this special time is we're in right now, why we're in it, and what you predict to occur within it.
In fact, that's the only time you can get a total solar eclipse is when the moon is close, because it looks bigger and it'll cover the whole face of the sun.
Within 70 miles, 1 degree of San Jose, within 140 miles of Los Angeles, within 70 miles of Seattle, and somewhere around the Pacific Ring of Fire, expects a major quake, a seven or better.
Just like in 1989, I said the same thing: 85% confident that we would have originally I said a 3.5 to 6 magnitude quake within one degree of San Jose.
And then as we approached that critical period of October 14th through 21st, 1989, the highest tidal force in three years, strange things begin to happen.
We begin to have a tremendous number of missing pets.
The lost and found column about quadrupled in length, much as it would after the 4th of July or after a very severe thunderstorm.
Well, we didn't have the 4th of July in October or a thunderstorm here.
And so when I saw the missing cats go from an average of 4 or 5 to 27, and the dogs go from an average of 20 to 58, I knew something was up.
Well, we have that same situation developing now.
The Los Angeles Times yesterday had 58 missing dogs, which is one of the highest totals they've ever had.
And here in San Jose, the Mercury News had a total of 37 missing dogs, which is the highest since Groundhog Day back in February.
And the missing cats are 16, and just five days ago they were at 9.
So this 16 is the highest since just before the 4.8 quake we had that shook my home here back on the 21st of May.
And we had my newsletter, it was at the printers on that very day, and in that June issue of Thezygy, my newsletter, there was a prediction that we would have a five or better in June, July, or August.
Well, it happened to be a 4.8 on May 21st, but I don't feel too badly about that because I think we were going to get a little more.
You're saying that on the West Coast, even if we don't get the big one that's going to occur somewhere on the Ring of Fire, it's going to be boom, boom, boom.
You've got to remember, we've got listeners coast to coast and way beyond.
Alaskans all across Alaska were heard, even in the Midwest.
Here's the facts.
Dear Art, please ask Ms. Berkeley, does he see any possibility of this particular quake window through the 8th of July affecting the central U.S., the new Madrid Fault and so forth?
And it's the most highly magnetic natural substance on Earth.
It's just Fe304.
Three parts iron to four of oxygen.
And the iron is in two different electrical states, in a valence state.
And it's the valence electron that jumps back and forth from orbit to orbit that makes this magnetic effect.
And so animals make it for mainly navigational purposes.
Even ancient Cambrian life called chitons, primitive sea life, had magnetite in their teeth.
And that not only is it a very hard mineral, but it also might allow them to feed in parallel paths rather than bumping into each other and fighting over every scrap of algae that they're feeding on.
But they know that I've been through those things, and so they confide in me.
And then when they find out they're not alone in the world, that there are a lot of people with these same symptoms, then it's very reassuring to them.
Now, the first time I ever heard about it, and each of these things I get into rather reluctantly, you know, I'm a scientist, and so I have this skepticism sort of built in.
But then I want to see what happens, and so I'm willing to test things.
And so this lady called me from New Brunswick, Canada, where she said she was a native New Brunswicker.
Actually, the first contact was by letter about a week after they had a 5.9 quake on the day of the eclipse of the moon on January 9th, 1982.
And since my wife is from eastern Canada, I sort of an affinity there.
And she heard me on a local station because Stan Friedman, whom you know well, had a science radio show back there.
He just moved into Fredericton, and he knew that their quake fit my theory.
And so they called me from the radio station, did I predict their quake?
Well, I said, no, I predicted the window, but I didn't know what was happening locally there to actually pin down your area as likely.
Well, what do you mean?
I said, well, like the water well changes and the radon gas and the tilt of the ground and any creeping faults and Animal activity, and she said, That sounds interesting.
Do you mind if I roll the tape?
And I said, No, go right ahead.
She said, Just a moment.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, my God, not another one.
And she had a 5.5 magnitude quake while she was on the phone with me.
And I thought, what are the chances you have a transcontinental call, and the 5.5 hits, and the epicenter is on the east end of that call.
And so 10 days later, I got this letter out of the blue.
Mr. Berkel said, Sonia Kudiback, and I've lost her totally.
I hope she contacts me again sometime.
She said, I'm a native New Brunswicker.
I'm a school teacher.
And I heard you talking about what animals get.
I hope you can explain what happened to me.
Otherwise, I feel I'm losing my mind.
I've never had any kind of sinus problem.
And I've also never felt an earthquake before.
But four days before that jolt, my head began to stuff up, and I got a tremendous headache that aspirin couldn't touch.
I was hyperactive.
I couldn't even stay seated at luncheon with some teacher friends two days before the quake.
The day before the quake, I felt compelled to clean my house from top to bottom.
And I'm normally quite content to leave books on the dustballs and the dishes in the sink and go to my studio and paint.
But she was driven like maybe a pregnant woman was before giving birth.
Has to make the nest right for something that's coming.
The next day, she went to bed without supper that night.
Next morning, tried to get up early, couldn't.
She said, I lay back on the bed, and suddenly, as if passing over a mountain peak, why the pressure disappeared and the pain disappeared.
And as I marveled at this first return to normalcy, the first tremors hit.
Now, that was on a Saturday.
The next day, she felt pretty good, and then towards the evening, it began to stuff up again, the headache came, and the next day was this 5.5 aftershock that hit when I was on the phone.
A tsunami requires up and down motion on the seafloor.
So the San Andreas Fault isn't going to give you much of a tsunami.
It's like if you have a big dishpan full of water and there's a dish, a big platter in the bottom, if you pick the platter up by the edge and just slip it out, nothing happens.
If you pick it up straight, it's going to make up the water well over the top.
Well, I'm a fellow in the Geological Society of America.
I've been a member since 1959.
And I am a member of the Seismological Society of America, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the Peninsula Geological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
And I founded the Sabre Society, which was an inner professional group that operated for about 18 years here based at San Jose State University.
I take my science very seriously.
And I find that if you close your mind, you're no longer a scientist.
I grew up near the San Andreas Fall at North End, San Bernardino.
And then at age 13, I moved to Alaska and commercial fish in Prince Williamstown and seen a lot of the destruction, the aftermath from the 64 earthquake.
And I have a question.
I'm still in the fishing industry.
I live here in Avalok Beach, fairly close to Parkfield.
And I was wondering, is there any changes in regards to sea mammals or fish before an earthquake?
For example, in the three weeks prior to our Loma Prieta quake at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, there were two beaked whales, baby beaked whales, that washed ashore.
And these things were about nine feet long.
They were alive, and they'd never seen live ones before.
Extremely rare.
They brought them over to Marine World and they tried to give them ground-up fish food and they were trying to nurse from the fingers of the keepers.
And so they realized these were younger than they thought, and they brought in milk, and they survived for just a couple of weeks.
But they died, I believe, before the earthquake itself.
While these rare beasts were being taken care of at Marine World, another rare pygmy sperm whale washed up to Santa Cruz Beach.
And that they brought down to the Monterey Aquarium, where they were taking care of that.
That did last past the time of the earthquake.
But just the existence and the washing up of these critters alive would have been newsworthy even if the quake hadn't followed.
So the strongest quake since 1906 in the Bay Area is accompanied by this extremely rare marine mammal beaching.
The worst case of marine mammal beaching in the history of California was in late January of 1971.
And do you know what happened on February 9th of 1971 on the day of the eclipse of the moon?
We got the San Fernando earthquake.
And there were 200 dolphins that had beached on San Clemente Island in late January.
Jim, what can you tell us about the nuclear plants?
And in other words, have they been built well enough that if an eight-pointer touches off somewhere in Southern California, the plant's going to stay in one piece, or what do you know about that?
But again, for what you are predicting, the boom, boom, boom, along the west coast, that is you're predicting that with about an 85% probability of occurring.
For example, the highest tidal force in the history of the world since 1600 to the year 2200.
It's in a book by Dr. Fergus Wood, a former relief with the East Coast and Geodetic Survey, and it became the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Anyway, is a genius and the master meteorologist, oceanographer, and geophysicist anyway.
This book shows all of my seismic windows.
And I didn't run across it until about 1979 after I've been doing it for five years.
So in that book, he described the strongest tidal force that in this 600-year period has occurred on January 4th, 1912.
So as soon as I saw that date, guess what the first thing I did?
Went to the earthquake records.
And in the U.S. earthquake book published every few years by the Department of Interior, they had listed for 1912, 1913 only two quakes for California, Nevada.
One was in December of 1912, down near Oxnard, about a five.
But the stronger quake, the strongest in two years in two states, was near Bishop, about a 5.5.
It was felt strongly in Fresno and Bakersfield.
And that was on January 4th, 1912, the day of the maximum tidal force in 600 years.
And so I brought this information to my friends at the USGS, and they said, Jim, haven't you heard of coincidence?
And I said, yes, I've also heard of corroborative evidence.
And so often they will say, we can't lend any credibility to this work because other people have looked at it and they failed to find any correlation between tides and quakes.
Well, they are unfamiliar with the 300 articles in the world literature over the last 30 years or so.
In fact, two scientists in 1983 in the journal Nature noted that the pattern of larger earthquakes in Southern California seemed to be that there would be stronger quakes, six magnitude or better, around the time of the nodal point of the moon every 19.6 years.
Now, the nodal point is when it's as high in the sky as it can get, and so it's exerting the greatest gravity at this latitude.
And in 1983, in July, in that issue, they projected ahead to November of 87, four years later, when would be the next nodal point.
And they said we expect there will be a six on the San Andreas system in Southern California around November of 87.
Well, on October 1st of 87, not quite November, the strongest quake since 1982 hit, and that was at Twittier.
First given a 6.1 and later lowered to about a 5.9.
So they'd say, well, it didn't make a six.
Besides, it wasn't on the San Andreas proper.
Well, then on November 23rd of 1987, I was working in my office on the seventh floor of the Santa Clara County building.
I noticed that my pendulum, just a carpenter's plumb bob on about a five-foot cat gut extending from the ceiling, it was swaying about two inches.
And everybody was leaving around dusk.
And I said, look at that.
It was doing that same thing back in 1979 when they had the six and a half magnitude quake down in Brawley.
And sure enough, it was the Superstition Hills fault that cut loose with a 6.3 near dusk, just as predicted by Drs. Kanopoff and Steve Kilston, the astronomer, in their article.
And the next morning, near dawn, as predicted by them, a 6.8 followed.
So they got two quakes in November of 87, predicted four years in advance.
And Steve Kilston, the astronomer, was elated, and I've heard him speak.
I sat in the audience and heard him talking about syzygies and perigees and perihelions and saying the U.S. Geological Survey won't return my calls.
And then Dr. Konophoff had an interesting reaction.
He's an emeritus professor of seismology at UCLA.
A world reputation to uphold.
And after the quake, he was quoted as saying, I've just spent the last four years trying to convince my colleagues I hadn't actually predicted a quake and the damn thing happened.
But a comment first, just a little additional piece of corroborative evidence to support your tidal theory.
Throughout California, I have done some geophysical measurements with gravity meters.
And, you know, just to corroborate your theory on it, the effect that the tidal forces have, we do have to correct for the tidal forces in our gravity meters because gravity is not a constant.
California Retired Geologist's Insights00:09:27
unidentified
But that's just one little piece of evidence that adds to your theory.
My main questions are this.
The San Andrea tectonics have occurred really for the last 29, 30 million years based on the evidence.
Throughout the world, of course, it's a multi-billion-year-old cycle.
Do you have any theories that vary much from the general thinking in the geologic community towards plate tectonics and how they affect the movement or how the mantle movement affects the movement of the plates?
And then the second question that I have is, and I'll listen off the air.
Are you familiar with Lawrence Livermore's attempts to drill about a 50,000-foot well in the Carrizo Valley within a half a mile of the San Andreas Fault, stopping every thousand meters or so to drill a horizontal lateral 3,000 to 4,000 feet through the fault zone, continuously coring?
No, I just was aware of what they're doing up in the Tehachapes.
And it was interesting that when they drilled down about over 5,000 feet, they got water samples, expecting it might be juvenile water coming up from below.
And from the isotopic analysis, it turned out to be meteoric water.
It was rainwater that has filtered its way down, which helps to explain why landslides will develop often after the heaviest rainfall, maybe a month or so, as the water percolates down to the slide plane.
The same thing with earthquakes.
And that's why I was telling people up in the northwest.
They had their record, 100-year floods here this last winter.
And I said, oh, boy, these high tide periods coming up towards summer look to be extremely important.
And sure enough, the biggest quake in 31 years did hit on the 2nd of May.
Same way in Landers in 1992, there were tremendous floods in Southern California, and twice the Los Angeles River lived up to its name, was a raging torrent.
You may remember the poignant scene of this.
This young boy, Hispanic kid, was swept down in the current, and the fireman reached over from an overpass and tried to grab his hand, and he slipped free and he drowned.
Well, it was just two months later when the Landers quake hit on June 28th, just two days before the eclipse of the sun.
Well, I'm not a geophysicist nor a seismologist, and I'm willing to accept that the plates are driven by plumes, heat plumes, coming up from deep down in the lower mantle.
And they come up like in a heated pot of soup.
They form currents that come up and they drive the surface material apart.
And that's constantly placed up in the center, and it goes back down at the edges.
And that is analogous to what happens in the Kilauea fire pit.
They've got a lot of photographs of the kind of mechanism that's been proposed for the plates.
We know when new material comes up, it must go someplace, otherwise, the Earth would be expanding constantly, and then it fit in nicely.
That's where the trenches are, and that's where the oceanic plates are driven down beneath the continental plates in most cases, and create the deeper and deeper earthquakes as you go away from the oceans and deep under the continents.
But at the international meeting of the Geological Society in Montreal in 1972, I raised a question that's never been answered by anybody.
You have to, we're given the plate tectonic theory as a given mechanism.
It's already in operation, but it has to start somewhere.
Did it start with the trenches or did it start with the ridges?
The new material coming up, or the old material sort of going down and dragging the plates with them?
Right.
Well, I think it actually began with the heat, the convection driving up and creating the ridges.
Well, then the Earth's lithosphere, the upper mantle and the crust, can accept an awful lot of compression.
And through a few million years, even a thousand feet of plate can accept this compression.
And then it has to go somewhere.
And so then a trench must be initiated, if this is the right order.
And when it's initiated, it must be an horrendous event.
Just suddenly, whoosh, and you might create a very large earthquake at such a point.
Well, people have been bugging me for a couple of years, and I don't know why it took me this long to get it done, but I had several calls about you the other day, and so it just all came together.
Was that fault is really probably the most hazardous fault in the United States.
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Really, that's what I was going to ask you, because I know during our training and during certain times of the year, we were always taught that the longer a fault stays, it builds up tension.
I thought you were especially ripe back in 1982, 83, when the Salt Lake was filling rapidly and spilling out into the Great Salt Desert, the Bonneville Salt Let's, because you were unloading the mountains, the snow was melting and coming down and filling the valley, loading the valley, and the mountains are moving up and the valley is dropping down along the Wasatch Fault.
And this was abetting that.
This was helping it.
Now, it hasn't had a major earthquake on that fault since probably 1600, something.
And that was at the end of what's called the Little Ice Age, when there was a lot more precipitation.
And I'm sure Lake Bonneville was at a higher stand at that time, too.
So it may have had an effect then, but it didn't seem to have much of an effect this time.
There was about a five-magnitude quake out by the airport there in 1982, in I think September.
And that may be all that.
See, the maximum stresses, whatever you impose on a fault line, if the fault line's not ready to fail, and it can only yield the energy that's stored up on it.
So if you've just had a big earthquake on a fault and you happen to have the greatest tides in a thousand years, you're not going to get a great earthquake.
It's already been relieved.
So I'm not concerned, for example, about the southern San Andreas Fault in the South Peninsula of this area.
A very small, not a very large book, but full of information.
And he ran into the same problems I have.
He was saying as Day County, Florida psychologist, he had access to all of their suicides, for example.
Yes.
And he found a tremendous correlation with the phase of the moon, especially full moon.
And as soon as he published on it, he was attacked rather viciously by his colleagues.
And it turns out they weren't even arguing about what he was doing.
They were arguing about what they were doing.
They were arguing about the time of death of the victim rather than the time of the attack.
The death is sort of random, sometimes drags out for months.
But the attack time is what was critical, and they were analyzing the wrong end of the situation.
And he had a chapter in there about the Earth and the geophysical environment.
Some articles about the quakes.
Here's something that relates directly to the moon.
When the astronauts landed on the moon, about the first three times, they put seismographs there.
And we established without any question there are lunar quakes.
There are moonquakes.
And they occur almost all at the time of the monthly perigee when the Earth's gravity is strongest because you're closest to the moon.
And when I first heard about that about 1976, and I'd only been at my studies for two years at that point, after I go, here's great corroboration.
Again, I hear, well, come on.
The Earth is 81 times as massive as the Moon.
So it's easy to see how the Earth's gravity could trigger moonquakes, but you couldn't turn that around.
And I said, come on.
Now, the Moon doesn't have a liquid core.
It doesn't have moving plates.
It doesn't have active volcanoes that we know about.
The Earth has all of those.
So if you had the Earth is like a growing baby, and the moon is like an old man.
If you had this baby and an old man lying on a cot side by side and you stroked each of their soles of their feet with a feather, where would you get this reaction?
What you're giving me are the intensity numbers, usually given in Roman numerals.
And they vary from place to place, but each earthquake has only one magnitude, one energy.
How many sticks of dynamite was it equivalent to?
But the effects are which side of the brick wall were you on?
How far away were you from the explosion?
So there is an infinite number of intensities.
And it varies usually upon your local geologic setting and the type of structure you're in.
But all those numbers you gave me were not, you know, the world has never experienced a nine Richter magnitude, as far as we know.
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The Lisbon quake of 1755 is about 8.9.250 zip codes.
That's the way it's done now.
So if you don't want to have the federal government pay over an 8.0 for people's damage, regardless of how wealthy they are, and excerpt them from paying taxes in the year that an 8.0 happened, then you're going to pick the lowest magnitude.
And if it's a thrust fault like the Northridge quake, it's usually worse on the upper plate where a massive rocks are moving up and over the lower plate, a gently sloping surface.
And if it's a strike-slip fault, it's usually a neater earthquake, a cleaner bundle of energy.
And as I mentioned, you don't get tsunamis from the sideways motions.
But it's very difficult to anticipate.
Like the epicenter of Loma Prieta was 60 miles away from the Lipka.
Every earthquake is unique, and every earthquake is a learning experience.
And our safety measures are about 10 years behind Mother Nature.
We came up with the Field Act, which in California is probably the single greatest safety act on seismic matters that ever occurred.
And it followed the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, which occurred on March 10th on the day of the eclipse of the moon.
And in researching that two years ago in some old newspapers, I saw some startling information.
The governor was so, and Southern California was so shaken to their core by this 6.3 quake in which dozens of schools collapsed, the old unreinforced masonry schools that were so typical.
They did a quick study.
They hired a commission.
Within three weeks, the commission reported to Governor, I think, Olson at the time, and they said, had that earthquake not occurred at 5.45 in the afternoon, but around 2 o'clock in the afternoon when all of the schools were in full session, we would have lost between 10,000 and 30,000 kids.
Now, that's the reason the legislature got off its dust and adopted the Field Act that same month.
And the Field Act said, something special about schools.
We've got kids in here, and that's our future, and so we're going to design these to a much higher standard.
And through the years, since 1933, the post-Field Act schools have done very well, and the Field Act schools have almost been wiped out by subsequent earthquakes.
But one real caveat there, the Field Act only applies to public schools.
So those parochial and private schools, to whom the buildings have been sold at bargain prices, they still have the same risk.
Well, see, this is what I've been hoping to get, a clearinghouse for this kind of exotic information.
And it could be based on the seismic windows known for your particular area.
As I say, most of the windows for the United States are the same window we have that I've been talking about.
But if you lived in the Salton Sea, you would find it didn't fit.
I had one woman around here that would just panicked about earthquakes.
And I said, well, you could get another place down by Brawley, and you could move down there during the windows here and move up back up here during the windows down there.
In fact, there was a fellow in the movie industry that goes to Sedona, where it's very quiet, seismically too, and comes back to his Hollywood work between the windows.
And one night he came back in to the Los Angeles airport, had been here just for about two hours when a five-magnitude quake hit, and I got a rather angry call from him that night.
Yeah, Jim, listen, I live right on Lake Ontario, pretty much between Rochester and Buffalo.
And a few years ago, I encountered some geologists going across our farm.
They informed me that they were tracking the Clarendon Fault.
They said it came up from, I believe they said it came up from Pennsylvania.
I don't know if they were trying to scare me or what, but in so many words, they told me that it was quite, it was a fault that showed a lot of activity.
And as it is, they tracked it right across my farm.
And I was just wondering, I subscribed to SeismoWatch, and I have not received anything, any information on this Clarendon fault.
I hadn't heard that particular fault name, but certainly the St. Lawrence zone, the lineament there, is like a finger pointing down to New Madrid, Missouri.
And there have been a number of seven-magnitude quakes along that major suture.
They call it a geo-suture.
And it's a zone of weakness, and unusual rock types develop along it.
And there have been some very destructive quakes going back into colonial times.
And, of course, you mentioned Pennsylvania.
You know, they had a couple of 4.6s just about two years ago near Harrisburg.
Surprised everybody, the largest quakes in the history of Pennsylvania.
And at one point, I had a list of 12 earthquakes that had been centered in Pennsylvania.
All right, so everybody needs to understand that your window applies not just to the Ring of Fire, not just to California, not just to the West Coast, but anywhere subject to earthquakes.
Well, by inspection, you can find that the Salton Sea trough is out of phase, and that many east-west structures like the Pyrenees Mountains and the Camp Chatka area where the faults are moving.
Yes, four main predictions, specific ones for time, place, and magnitude.
That within 70 miles of San Jose, California, in the south end of San Francisco Bay, I expect a 3.5 to 6 magnitude quake to occur during that time.
And within 140 miles of Los Angeles, the same range and magnitude during the same period.
And within 70 miles of Seattle, the same thing.
Now, the Seattle one, people say, well, they just had this strongest quake in 31 years, so it's easy to hit the aftershocks.
Well, my last window was opened on the 1st of June, and there hadn't been a quake stronger than 3 since the 5th of June.
And on June 1st, just 20 minutes into my window, they had a 3.2, and that hasn't been exceeded since June.
Then, worldwide, most of the major quakes of seven magnitude or greater, about 80% of the major quakes around the world do occur around the specific ring of fire, that world-encircling band of trenches and volcanoes and larger earthquakes.
So then other seismically active areas in the world should also look to their own local effects.
The tides only really tell you when.
They give you an idea as to when, but they don't really tell you where or how big.
Until you look at your springs or your, if you have hot springs, they may change their temperature.
Often, over a period of months prior to a quake, the volume of water will decrease and the temperature will decrease, and then suddenly the quake will hit and you'll find the temperature is 10 or 20 degrees warmer and may be full of H2S gas or maybe releasing a lot of radon gas that could have been detected days in advance of the earthquake.
The ground may tilt.
If you're near a fault that's been known to creep, it may suddenly increase its creep rate as the Hayward Fault has been known to do now since Christmas time.
It's been creeping 30 times faster than it was for the previous 30 years.
On my arrival into Santa Clara County in 1973, when I started that year, started to work for the county, I found that this bill had just been adopted because largely of the San Fernando earthquake in 1971.
And they said, hey, if your house is on a moving landslide, you have to disclose that because that's a material fact.
But we have no regulations about next to a fault that's either moving or likely to move.
And people always had this feeling, well, I know there's a fault around here somewhere, and not understand that they're right on top of it until the sidewalk begins to move apart.
And this winery down south of Hollister was the first place they ever discovered creeping faults where the fault would move without benefit of earthquakes.
Oh, I would, in fact, probably wanted to visit someplace else for a while.
Little vacation.
If I lived 100 feet away, it wouldn't bother me, except I wouldn't want to go up and work on the chimney or something, you know.
And I would tell the kids, hey, if something happens, and we have our aunt Margaret over in Nevada, you call her, and I'll call her wherever we are when the quake hits, and we'll say, hey, we're all right.
And then we'll call her back and see how the other people are doing.
I was passing through Anchorage after the big quake.
I saw the effects of it.
actually saw it.
And I've had nightmares ever since, Jim, about the Earth actually opening up, and I know it sounds dumb, but swallowing me up, falling down in a crack, and just disappearing into the Earth.
Creeping from the living room into the bedroom to sleep at night, she comes in in little stages, like little sneaking in, you know, and put it back to a bed, and she's right back again.
And today she'll follow me around the house.
I didn't know why.
And also, our birds are very timid.
When I'm coming up to the front door of our house, there's a lot of birds always around the front on our lawn.
I can walk almost up to them.
And a few of them I walked up to tonight when we came in.
And I thought maybe one of them was injured because it wasn't moving away.
And it went down through the upper Paleozoic rocks down into the basement below, which they thought was perfectly safe, out of sight, out of mind.
And all of a sudden, the quakes began and began to do some damage.
And one lone geologist, David Evans, I don't know if he's still alive, spoke up and he said, you know, we didn't have these quakes until they started pumping that water down there.
I think it's kind of lubricating the faults and increasing the pore pressure and creating earthquakes.
And the high scientists denied it.
Absolutely not.
Do you realize that's like saying we could raise the Rockies with an eye drop?
And so then they had to shut the pumps down for maintenance, and the earthquakes stopped.
And after a few weeks, they started them up again, and the quakes began after a lag time of a few days.
And then they said, oh, we thought so all the time.
So now it's become known worldwide.
You can cause earthquakes by changing the water, the fluid pressure.
All right, let me talk for a second, because I promised to do it about Stan Deo in Australia.
Stan has stayed very close to us.
He's a great guy.
He has been looking at these naval satellite photographs, heat imaging photographs, and he has been making predictions based on what he calls heat plumes that show up on the satellite imagery.
And inevitably, where it gets hot and then hotter and hotter, he predicts a quake.
And sure enough, something happens on a fairly regular basis.
His prediction, even though he's not been doing it for a long time, he's been very accurate.
We know that sub-sea volcanoes cause thermal currents and sometimes ash and steam to come to the surface and create new islands.
We know the oceanic ridges are the source of new magma coming up.
I would think that on a worldwide basis, 70% of the world is water and miles deep, that it would be hard to see what's happening with the crust below over broad areas, not just over volcanic vents.
And I would like to know what resulted last month, well, no, earlier this month here, the mid-Atlantic Ridge, the seven-magnitude quake on the 2nd of June was the largest ever measured in that area just north of Brazil and the Guianas.
Yes.
So I would like to know if there was a remarkable heat flow in the days and weeks prior to that.
That would be a unique event, whereas most of our big quakes are around the Pacific anyway.
Okay, I don't know about that part of the farm belt, but we're getting flooded out.
My question was, though, a few years ago when I was in high school, they were preparing us for an earthquake that somebody had announced was going to happen.
Now, the local paper was, let's see, in Memphis, they were sending me, the radio station was sending me the paper so I could count the animals down there.
And they did reach a high.
You had about a five-magnitude quake a couple of months in advance of that December date.
I was just looking at when you mentioned that, I pull out this environmental impact statement, and it shows a seismic map of Canada and part of the United States.
And the area that they show that they want to put this thing in is on the Canadian Shield near the Hudson Bay area.
Nuclear Waste Sites Discussed00:06:10
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And on this map, there's absolutely no seismic activity except for a few little things.
But everywhere else, that map is everything I know about the area.
Well, then, in that case, I would suggest you sit tight, and we'll come back to you after the top of the hour and touch on so much more that's sitting here waiting.
If she's coming to San Jose on Sunday, right in the middle of the window, the full moon, all the rest of it, where would she best be should there be an earthquake?
I mean, obviously, you stay out of great big, tall buildings.
What happened the last time you had conjunct the moon and Jupiter?
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Well, we have them every month, but we don't have them on a full moon on perigee, and with the tides going up and the dogs going off, and the magnets coming off.
Yeah, in fact, I called him when I suddenly noticed that the giant crater in Yucatan is at 19.5 degrees, and none of his publications have talked about that.
Well, it proposed a theory that suggests that there is, at various times, gigantic crustal movement that everything shifts, and that they have found vegetation up at the North Pole and so forth and so on.
Yeah, well, I worked north of the Arctic Circle in the Brooks Range, and there were poppies and buttercups and everything growing in the hills, and right next to the glaciers and the frozen ground, permafrost is right there, about two feet down.
So you can just picture an elephant wandering around and slipping into some sludge and getting frozen rather quickly, even with the buttercups in his stomach.
It doesn't mean he lived in a temperate climate.
And if he did, why did he need all the hair?
And why'd you have the woolly rhinoceroses and all this stuff?
So, yeah, Sandberg, Ivan Sanderson, and I guess Casey and a few others talk about this massive displacement.
Yes.
Hapgood is another leading proponent.
And there's no question the magnetic field, the magnetic pole moves slowly around.
Absolutely.
But we've never had any indication of a sudden shift of the crust itself.
There was a lady that had a seeing eye dog, a German shepherd, and I've heard this now two other times.
The night before a strong earthquake, the quakes over in Livermore, her dog developed convulsions, and she thought she was going to lose him.
That bet couldn't see what was wrong, and after a few hours, he was okay.
The next morning, she walked out for a morning walk.
She opened up the front door, and she said it was almost like opening up an oven door.
I felt as if the air were layered.
It felt like it had a texture to it.
I don't know how to describe it, she said.
And then the quake happened.
And about two months later, she had moved to another locality south of San Francisco, and they had a 3.8.
And I called her, and she said he had convulsions the night before that one, too.
And then I just read from a seismologist in Mexico City that before the big Mexico quake in 1985, his German shepherd had had convulsions the night before, and he never could understand it.
There's electromagnetic energy out there, and it's affecting our nervous systems.
And what I liked about it, too, in the back, in the glossary, it has a list of all of the phases of the moon until about the year 2006 or something like that.
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Oh, well, that's great.
And the last name of when the snakes away is Helmut.
Assuming your hypothesis that water table hydraulic pressure frees up the plates, would the drastic lowering of the water table in central California, especially the San Joaquin Valley, cause the area to act optimistically as an anchor or pessimistically as a pivot?
This was written up in We Are the Earthquake Generation by Jeffrey Goodman.
And he referred to the San Joaquin Valley as moving up and down, I guess, dozens of feet.
I worked there with the Bureau of Reclamation for about three years, and there's two kinds of subsidence going on.
A shallow subsidence caused by dry soils getting saturated, and they just collapse.
And that causes up to 20 or 30 feet of subsidence, along with the pulling out the deep water table from the farmers and ranchers.
And that also adds to groundwater table reduction and the surface dropping along with it.
So those two main kinds of subsidence create big problems for canals and topographic surveys and everything else through there, but they're not it will have nothing to do with the plates.
The theory that I talk about is that the fault lines, the shallow, relatively shallow fault lines are where the water collects and increases the pressure.
But it has very little to do with the plate movements, which are thousands of miles across.
Well, did you put in about the flooding, your floods of the century this last winter?
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Yes, I know.
And one of the reasons why I think we've been having a lot of floodings is a few several months back, Art had a gentleman on or a whole bunch of people talking about, remember when they were saying they felt that the earth shifted and all this stuff?
Just about the same time the earth shifted, our weather changed dramatically here.
So not only do we have the moon, do we have these tidal forces all coming together at once in the window that we're in right now, but we have the Northwest, which took probably the biggest soaking it's had in a long time.
Yeah, and the 5.5 was the strongest quake in 31 years up there.
The Mount St. Helens quake, you had a quake there on March the 20th of 1980 in the middle of a window that was just about equal to the one we're in right now.
And there was a 4.3 quake right under the volcano of Mount St. Helens, which was the strongest quake on the west coast during my window.
So I was a bit disappointed, but I was at least pointed into Mount St. Helens.
Then the next couple of days, they had a couple of other threes.
One week later, I was being interviewed by a TBS television crew about earthquakes, and I was waving my arms around the Calaveras Fault, and we talked for about a half hour.
And as they folded up their equipment, we started back to the town.
And they said, well, speaking of other things, Jim, what do you think about Mount St. Helens?
And I said, I think that volcano means business.
I'd give it a 50-50 chance to erupt this year and become the first one since Mount Lassen back in 1922 in the control state.
Listen, here's something from down in San Diego, an observation.
This afternoon, I was down at the beach at La Jolla, San Diego area, very exclusive, I might add, and witnessed several sea lions coming in close to the beach, which was crowded with people.
One seal came up out of the water amidst a group of people, stayed on the sand even after the children and adults formed a ring around it.
The seals' behavior was very odd, very out of place.
And I've not seen this curring here before, even though I've been around these coastal waters all my life.
Also, there were no gulls flying in the area.
It was a notable absence.
Also, very curious, is this a possible precursor to the big one, Kurt in Encinitas?
Well, when I was going to Davis, we were all up in arms about the testing up in Amchitka with an H-bomb to create a harbor and to see what might happen and that sort of thing.
We signed petitions and there were like eight government agencies and six of them said don't and the two that said yes were military agencies, and so of course they outvoted everybody else and they went ahead with it, but for the next month there were no quakes around the ring Of Fire to speak of.
Nothing really happened.
Now there's no question that within a few tens of miles of an underground nuclear test you often get little shifts in the crust and you get quakes that are considerably smaller than the energy of the blast itself, and this has caught my attention for some time, but I don't see anything to it, although that that very same Mexican quake I just talked about, that happened to be the day of one of the largest blasts they ever did underground north of Las Vegas, the Frenchman's Flat.
And when I saw that I said uh-oh.
And then I looked carefully at the times and the earthquake came before the nuclear blast and I didn't hear anybody say that the blast was triggered by the earthquake.
Yes well, I've lived in this area for a long time now and I well recall we in Las Vegas we would give out warnings to get away from precarious positions, get off tall buildings, all the rest of it when we'd light one torch one off here well up around the Bay Area.
I could tell when I'd hear when the blasts were supposed to go off and I thought I'd have my pendulum there and I could.
It would actually move.
The house would move past the pendulum about a quarter of an inch, as it would take about 90 seconds for the energy from that nuclear blast near Las Vegas to come up to the Bay Area.
There was a kind of a secret plan talked about during the Reagan administration when we were busily arming the Contras and trying to see to it that Nicaragua had a peaceful democratic future instead of a communist one.
And there was this quiet talk in the background that there was a plan to literally blast a new Panama Canal all across Nicaragua.
And I brought in at the start of my talk a whole list of scientific pronouncements over the previous 15 years that we are 10 years away from effective earthquake prediction.
And the next year, we're still a decade away from earthquake prediction.
And it kept every year, the goal would recede 10 years.
And then I brought up this clipping from Russia, and it said, the Soviet scientists now believe they are five years away from effective earthquake prediction.
And I leaned over this table with all these greybeards around, and I said, gentlemen, we have an earthquake prediction gap.
Again, are you focusing on the higher end of the prediction?
It's a 3.5 to 6.
It may well be a 3.8, which you couldn't feel for more than 75 miles.
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Well, that's the thing.
You know, there are earthquakes in California every day virtually, you know, but most of them, you know, we don't feel, you know, most of them we're not aware of.
Well, when it gets to about 3.5, you're pretty sure it's a quake.
When it's 5, you have no doubt.
I had an immediate call after the 5.1 hit Seattle from Laura Lee.
You know about Laura Lee?
Oh, sure.
Okay.
And so I've been on her show about a week earlier, and when the quake hit, the first call I got was from Laura Lee.
Jim, we just heard a big bang, and now my chandelier is kind of waving.
I think we had an earthquake, but my husband just thinks a big truck went by.
And I said, it sounds like a quake to me.
And all of a sudden thing, I had another call, and I call answering, and I got it was another lady from Seattle who had experienced the quakes and knew it was, and they put the two of them together.
I'm a fascinating and very interesting guest, Art.
Thank you.
As always.
I wanted to ask both of you if you are aware that beginning this month, the entire West Coast from Mexico to Seattle will be having a multi-jurisdictional task force exercise.
Exercise 140, I think they call it.
Yes, and it's involving, I guess, huge foreign troops that have been flying in all week into Miramar Naval Air Station and Brown Field.
I don't know much about these military exercises.
I think, Art, you mentioned you were in the military at one time.
I mean, let's say the federal government had, through whatever resource, Jim Birkeland or anybody else had knowledge there was going to be an eight-point quake in the Los Angeles area.
Well, they would at least tell the government, and they'd say, cancel the leaves, the elective surgeries, postpone those, open up the warehouses, get ready to move foods, check all the batteries, check the reservoirs, that sort of thing.
Yes, and that's why I don't think they've really had that.
You know, I've gotten a few rumors at times.
Well, they put all the fire engines outside of the fire station, which is one of the techniques.
And I've heard things about moving ships and so forth.
I remember my old seismology professor, Perry Byerly, at Berkeley, said one of his proudest moments is when there was some concern about an earthquake.
So if you were going to look for signs that they knew something we didn't know and they were getting ready for something big, what would you most look for?
And they, like that Long Beach quake in 1933, the day before, there was about a 3.8.
Loma Prieta had two quakes of over five magnitude, one the year before and one two months before.
Interesting, too, I got a call from a fellow on Santa Cruz Mountains who got bedridden.
He could hardly stand for a couple of weeks prior to that quake.
He moved away to get closer to a hospital, and he got better real fast.
He went back on the mountain and he had a relapse.
So his friend was walking along the beach at Santa Cruz with the boyfriend in the waves, was barefooted, and all of a sudden she got this electric shock.
Regarding the heat plumes, you know, that stand down.
Temperature anomaly, I guess it's Otis files.
Yes.
At the moment, I've been following a couple of plumes, and I think there's one right underneath Alaska at the moment because it's lit up all along the coastline like a corona.
And the other area that's lit up right now is Kemchatka.
And all of a sudden he heard clank, clank, clank, and he looked over and he thought the magnet lost its power and it had temporarily and then this big quake hit Tokyo.
3.5 to 6 magnitude quake in the San Jose, Los Angeles, and Seattle areas, and a major quake, a seven, around the ring of fire, which could possibly include the West Coast, Western America, but doesn't necessarily happen.
I noticed that Mexico City, the desks kind of held up the ceiling.
Waterbed, you get a better ride for sure.
And there was a convention of doctors here when the quake hit, and they were hoping they could count on the waterbed having a similar reaction the next time they have their convention here.