Using Toads to Predict Earthquakes 78
ClockEndGooner writes "The BBC is reporting that a team led by Dr. Friedemann Freund from NASA and Dr. Rachel Grant from the UK's Open University have found that 'animals may sense chemical changes in groundwater that occur when an earthquake is about to strike.' Just prior to the quake that struck L'Aquila, Italy in 2009, Grant observed a mass toad exodus from a colony she was monitoring as part of her PhD project, and her published results prompted NASA to contact her as they found that highly stressed tectonic plates released a greater amount of positively charged ions that affected the water quality, which was sensed by the toads. According to NASA's Freund, 'Once we understand how all of these signals are connected, if we see four of five signals all pointing in [the same] direction, we can say, "ok, something is about to happen."'"
Re:Oblig. (Score:2, Informative)
Explain again how toads can be used to detect earthquakes?
Predict, not detect.
And the answer is: you tell your haruspex to cut them open and examine their livers.
Re:Toads and earthquakes? (Score:3, Informative)
Found a whole book on this topic: Earthquakes and animals: from folk legends to science, By M. Ikeya (Google Books) [google.com]. Studies going back to at least 1923 are found via Google Scholar [google.com]. I'd be all in favor of studies which would figure out what mechanisms are involved here; we in the Pacific NW of the US are due for a real monster of a subduction quake someday, the hardship and loss of life will be quite extreme, and some advance notice would be welcome, to say the least.
Of course, test it out in some region which is prone to frequent minor quakes. And hope that it works in a region like ours, with very strong temblors happening about every half millennium. I'd assume it would, as Japanese quakes are also brought on by subduction; or is that only the case with the very strong ones?