Advance signs of Japanese earthquake discovered in data

[marcus]

This came out in May. I just saw it.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.2841

There were interesting signals in the atmosphere that peaked just 3 days before the earthquake struck.

Apparently the deep rock layers around the fault show they are stressed by releasing radon gas, which has a detectable influence on the atmosphere. The decay of radon causes condensation of water vapor, which causes heating (measurable) above where the quake was going to occur.

And the density of electrons in the ionosphere increased, above where the epicenter would be when the quake occurred, three days before.

The MIT Tech Review had a wider-audience piece about this:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26773/

 

[Dotini]

Ouzounov/NASA have confirmed strong coupling of lithosphere to atmosphere to ionosphere March 1-11, 2011 over the vicinity of the great Japan earthquake. We know there were a pair of X class CME's launched and arriving to Earth during this time. Billions of tonnes of hot, charged solar plasma will have been launched at 2200 km/s to accelerate towards this receptively coupled conduit down through an inviting hole in the magnetosphere and directly into the Pacific plate. What more powerful connection between Sun and Earth could be imagined? Perhaps a combination of Earthly and solar effects combined to result in the historic 9.0 Japan Quake of 3-11?

"These kinds of observations are consistent with an idea called the Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling mechanism." http://www.scec.org/news/01news/es_abstracts/ouzounov_freund.pdf

http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=09&month=03&year=2011
FAST CORONAL MASS EJECTION: A coronal mass ejection (CME) exploded from the vicinity of sunspot 1164 during the late hours of March 7th. It leapt away from the sun traveling ~2200 km/s, making it the fastest CME since Sept. 2005. A movie of the cloud prepared by Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab shows a possibly substantial Earth-directed component. This CME and at least one other could brush against Earth's magnetic field on March 9th or 10th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.

<-- Magnetospheric record for March, 2011

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUSMIN33A..03J
Abstract
We present the study of 682 earthquakes of ¡Ý4.0 magnitude observed during January 1991 to January 2007 in the light of solar flares observed by GOES and SOXS missions in order to explore the possibility of any association between solar flares and earthquakes. Our investigation preliminarily shows that each earthquake under study was preceded by a solar flare of GOES importance B to X class by 10-100 hrs.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/27jul_spacequakes/
Rumbles without sound
Auroras rain down
Magnetic fields shake
Beware the spacequake

Vortices swirl
plasma a'twirl
Richter predicts
a magnitude six

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

 

[Huyen401]

Wow, thanks for sharing this information! It's always fascinating to see how natural disasters can have subtle but detectable effects on the environment. It's amazing that these changes in the atmosphere were able to signal the impending earthquake. I'll have to check out the MIT Tech Review article for more details. Do you think this type of research could potentially help with predicting earthquakes in the future?