“Feather” asks: Animals are known to feel earthquakes. Why do humans not feel earthquakes coming?
Two assumptions hidden in your question, dear feather. One attributes to animals the ability to predict earthquakes and the other denies this ability to us, the crown of creation.
Some people think that we also get hints of near noises. Motoji Ikeya, a devout believer in the ability to predict earthquakes early, also counts the Homosapiens within a very long line of creatures who feel the impending disaster. IKEA has collected evidence from China and Japan in which people report fatigue, headaches and dizziness before an earthquake. It is hard not to doubt the testimonies of people after the incident trying to find early clues the day before and in the face of reports of fatigue and exhaustion before the quake other survivors insist on reporting rather restlessness and unexplained nervousness. These symptoms are too general and common to rely on as a sign of impending catastrophe and it is difficult to think of any day when there are no people who will report fatigue, headaches or irritability.
But what about the animals whose senses are sharper than ours? Many animals and in particular reptiles and repellents have developed susceptibility to earthquakes that may indicate the movement of a predator or prey and in many species the creation and absorption of tremors in water or soil is a form of communication. Mechanisms for absorbing these vibrations allow many animals to sense the first waves of vibrations before humans. Seismologists distinguish between several modes of oscillation in the ground. The fastest waves are called P waves and are, like sound waves, compression oscillations of the earth in the direction of wave progression. These waves are less harmful than the waves that come a few seconds or minutes later. These slow waves marked with the letter S move the ground “sideways” and are responsible for most of the damage: the collapse of buildings and the liquefaction of the ground. Many animals appear to respond to P waves as a fear-inducing stimulus and especially in escaping from cavities that may collapse.
Observations made by chance during earthquakes
In 2001, researcher Kymberley Snarr was given a rare opportunity: real-time documentation of monkeys in their natural habitat during an earthquake. Snar followed and photographed a band of howlers (howler monkey) in the rainforests of Honduras, the monkeys began to sound loud alarms, get up and climb about 30 seconds before the tree branches began to move and about 45 seconds before the researchers themselves felt the ground shake.
The first evidence linking animals to earthquakes is mentioned in the writings of historian Plutarch and the time difference between the animal’s strange behavior and the arrival of the waves of destruction corresponds to what can be expected from the time interval between waves P and S. Suddenly next to the wrestling hall (gymnasium) the boys went out to chase after her and the building collapsed a few seconds later.
But, feather, the myth attributes to animals the ability to predict hours and even days before the disaster i.e. an alert that will allow us to prepare for it. Such evidence of the strange behavior of animals in the days before the noise has a long history. In the winter of 373 BC the city of Helis was destroyed in Greece, the Roman writer Claudius Aelianus recounts “Five days before Helis disappeared many mice, mongooses, snakes, centipedes, and other animals left the city. The citizens of Helis were stunned but could not guess the cause. ” We understand the ability of animals to predict earthquakes has not progressed much in the 2400 years since the destruction of Hellis. Human psychology provides good reason to doubt many of these testimonies: If we interrogate enough dog owners there will probably be quite a few who will report “strange behavior” of the dog on the day before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and yet some of the evidence seems quite serious.
Earthquake in Cuba – Japan
On January 17, 1995, a strong earthquake shook the city of Kobe, Japan. Researchers in the lab, about 50 km from the noise center, monitored the activity of mice and accurately recorded the time the animals devoted to wheel rotation each day. The data show that in the two days before the noise the rodents were so restless Their daily average.Because this is a laboratory where environmental and nutritional conditions have been maintained, the likelihood of accidents in the activity outbreak is very low.In 2011 an earthquake in 7 hit Peru, analysis of cameras documenting mammalian and poultry activity in a nearby forest reserve showed a sharp decline in animal activity. In the 8 days before it, there was a further decrease in activity, 55 days before the noise that hit the L’Aquila area That in Italy there was a sudden decrease in the laying of eggs of toads that returned to normal function only a few days after the earthquake. In Japan, a statistically significant decrease in the milk yield of cows was found in the days before a strong earthquake.
Sense of electrical signals
How do animals feel when an earthquake approaches? There is of course no authoritative answer to this but a scientifically interesting possibility is that animals sense electrical signals generated from compression or deformation of the rock before the quake. Why would an impending earthquake transmit an electrical signal? One option is a piezoelectric effect. The earthquake is the result of the relative motion of the large rock slabs that make up the Earth’s crust. The main component in the bedrock, at the depths at which these collisions occur, is the granite containing quartz crystals. Quartz is a piezoelectric material, which means that a material on which pressure is applied will create an electrical voltage. It is this feature that makes it a component of clocks in which periodic fluctuations in the crystal translate into a cyclical change in voltage. When the granite slabs are compacted in the earth’s crust, an electrical voltage is created in the quartz crystals and a sudden release of pressure will cause a local change in the electric field that animals may feel.
An electric field itself that was thought to be reasonable for compacted rock slabs did indeed cause panic to animals exposed to it. Applying pressure of several hundred tons on granite rocks until it broke near rodent cages led, according to the researchers’ testimony, behavioral changes and an increase in adrenaline secretion. A similar action on non-piezoelectric rocks such as basalt or marble did not impress the animals. Another hypothesis is that electrically charged particles in the rock compacted deep into the ground flow to the surface, being emitted into the air and creating ionosphere disturbances that are expressed in electromagnetic radiation at very low frequencies. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that in those cases such as the earthquake in Peru or Italy the change in animal activity corresponded to the same electrical signals measured in the environment. It is not clear how such weak radiation can affect animals to the point of behavior change. A recently published hypothesis hangs this link in the ion channels: proteins that cross the cell membrane and control the entry and exit of ions. These channels are responsible for maintaining the concentration differences of ions (charged atoms) and thus for the differences in electrical voltage between the interior of the cell and its environment. These channels are sensitive to voltage differences so moving ions in their vicinity under the influence of the electric field ions in the environment may disrupt their activity. It is interesting to note that an animal considered in Japanese folklore to herald earthquakes is the catfish: a fish equipped with a sense organ that is sensitive to electric currents. Researchers who propose the electric sensing mechanism for earthquakes compute that such radiation generated by lightning may explain how some humans manage to “feel” a storm approaching from a distance. In addition to electricity, other signals that animals can sense are changes in the magnetic field – a means of navigating birds and bees or emitting gases from deep soil layers.
The observations are considered random and are not in consensus
These ideas are far from being in scientific consensus. Observations are valuable in science only if they are flats that are reproducible and it is difficult to reproduce an observation in behavioral changes of toads or mice under the same environmental conditions that prevailed at the time of the event. In addition the observations even if impressive are not uniform: how the same electrical disturbance will result in the cessation of wildlife activity in Peru and the overactivity of laboratory mice in Japan. The proposed mechanism of electrical signals sounds promising but its direct measurement using satellites has not to date yielded a clear correlation to frequent earthquakes.
Even if animals are felt in ominous signals then as a means of forecasting they simply do not deliver the goods. In February 1975 the seismologists recorded to their credit the first and only success (as of this writing) in a successful earthquake prediction when the residents of Haicheng in China received a warning a day before their city suffered an earthquake of 7.3 on the Richter scale. But it was not animals that saved the inhabitants but a series of preliminary noises that were correctly understood by the scientists. What to do: There are many events that can cause changes in the electric or magnetic field, not every earthquake will be accompanied by the same signals on the ground and animals do not need earthquakes to behave strangely. Despite the plethora of studies designed to predict earthquakes there is still no animal or warning mechanism to warn us in advance and we have no choice but to hope that the contractor has built us a stable enough house on the edge of the Syrian-African rift.
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