Monday, May 7, 2012

Myth Busting!

Over my time here at GeoNet there have been various hazards come and go, and with them come the various myths/legends and some weird theories.

So I've decided to do a 'Monday Myth Buster' series on our  Facebook and Twitter pages, to clarify some of these up, and you might get a laugh or two out of them!

Today we start with 'Earthquake Weather'. Now this belief dates back to the 4th Century where the famous Greek Aristotle said that earthquakes were caused by winds trapped in underground caves. Small quakes were thought to have been caused by air pushing on the cave roofs, and large ones by the air breaking the surface. This led to the belief in earthquake weather, if  a large amount of air was trapped underground, the weather would be hot and calm before an earthquake

As cool as this theory sounds, its just isn't true.  Earthquakes begin below the grounds surface, where the weather is too far away to have any effect. And statistics have shown that earthquakes occur in about the same numbers in wet / dry / cold and hot conditions.




4 comments:

  1. What do the stats say about the luna effect? *Flashback to mr crazy Moonman*

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was thinking of commenting on the Moon but it just unleashes all sorts of madness! There have been many studies but to date no conclusive evidence supporting the effect on the moon!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I just posted this on Geonet's FB page:

    WOW! Did anyone feel the Mega/Super quake in Christchurch last night caused by the Supermoon? No...neither did I...

    I'm not a fan of Moonman and his 'predictions' - showing a correlation in no way implies causality.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I reckon they are caused because we are taking toooo much of the earth's resources from the core. Oil, Gas, Coal etc

    ReplyDelete