Earth’s tides may help predict some of the most violent earthquakes on the planet.
In 2004 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake tore through the ocean floor off the coast of Sumatra. In the now infamous Indian Ocean tsunami that followed, nearly 300,000 people died, one of the worst natural disasters in history.
Could the catastrophe have been foreseen?
As tectonic stresses build along a fault, researchers have long suspected that Earth’s crust would show some sign that it is about to break. They’ve examined everything from radon levels in groundwater to changes in the electrical properties of the ionosphere, but earthquake prediction remains tantalizingly out of reach.
But one researcher, Sachiko Tanaka of the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention in Japan, has quietly built a case that giant quakes may be predictable using Earth’s tides.
Strange though it seems, scientists have found that tides — the combined effects of the weight of the ocean and gravitational pull of the sun and moon — do have a small but noticeable influence on earthquake behavior
http://news.discovery.com/earth/tidal-tremors-earthquake-prediction.html
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