Japan earthquake predicted 3 days before it happened? [Archive]

Anenome

03-18-2011, 12:07 AM

I will admit I don't know anything about the science in this video, but it was posted on March 8th and predicted there would be a major earthquake somewhere from March 11th-15th. Was it just a lucky guess? The rest of the video is a bunch of fear mongering and 2012 bullshit.

It's not actually that odd. There's tons of comets and earthquakes each year. In any case, she's wrong about the alignment. Here's 30 seconds of google research to debunk the silly claim that a comet could affect the earth enough to cause earthquakes (when even the moon can barely influence them):

From Super Moons to Comet Elenin – we will NOT get killer earthquakes from the sky (http://astroblogger.blogspot.com/2011/03/from-super-moons-to-comet-elenin-we.html)

I was wondering why Comet 2010 X1 Elenin (http://astroblogger.blogspot.com/2011/03/comet-2010-x1-elenin-its-just-lump-of.html) was attracting all the attention from the apocalypse and Nibiru crowd rather than Comet 2009 P1 Garrad (http://www.aerith.net/comet/catalog/2009P1/2009P1.html). It turns out it’s Leonid Elenin’s fault.

According to a video* going around the web at the moment, Leonid Elenin isn’t a real person (Leonid, a long time comet observer who contributes to the comet-obs discussion group and has his own blog (http://spaceobs.org/en/), may be surprised at his non–person status, but bear with me for a moment). Leonids' name is a secret code, ELE for Extinction Level Event and NIN for some tatty old goddess. I mean, you just can’t make a decent code from Garrad or McNaught.

The same video claims that it is comet Elenin, rather than “supermoons” (http://astroblogger.blogspot.com/2011/03/is-march-19th-full-moon-extreme-super.html) that caused the Chilean and Japanese earthquakes.

Now, I see this as another “teachable moment” as in the case of the so-called “supermoons” (http://astroblogger.blogspot.com/2011/03/is-march-19th-full-moon-extreme-super.html). There are two issues here; first the statistical issues and then the ideas of scale.

First off, let’s try thinking statistically. In the video much is made of the claim that within 5 days of the alleged closest approach of Elenin and the Earth there was a large earthquake. Now, in any given year there are 1319 quakes between magnitudes 5-5.9, 134 earthquakes of magnitude 6-6.9 (this includes the earthquake that demolished Christchurch) and 15 earthquakes of magnitude 7-7.9. So, choose any random date and within 5 days of that you will almost certainly, on average have a quake of magnitude 6-6.9 in that date range and a roughly 20% chance of having a larger magnitude quake in that time slice. Thus a simple “earthquake somewhere near a comet close approach” is not by itself convincing. You need some sort of physical plausibility.

As we saw in the “supermoon” (http://astroblogger.blogspot.com/2011/03/is-march-19th-full-moon-extreme-super.html) article, gravitational tidal effects could plausibly trigger earthquakes. The Moon is large and close, but even with the Moon the effect is quite small, it only occurs for certain types of shallow earthquake, and even then less than one percent of these types of earthquake are triggered by lunar tides. Now, The Moon is 7x1022 Kg in mass and 384401Km away. At the March closest approach mentioned in the video, comet Elenin was 273137000 Km away. We don’t know the mass of Elenin, but it is likely to be much smaller than comet Halley, which has a mass of 2.2×1014 Kg. We can use the mass of Halley as a proxy of Elenin for the calculations below.

You can already see that the tidal force due to Elenin is much, much less than that due to the Moon, and we know that the tidal force falls off as the cube of the distance. Now we know the formula for tidal force and we can calculate the tidal force of Elenin relative to the Moon (using Halley's mass for Elenin, an overestimate). It’s a staggering 1034 times less than that of the Moon. So the plausibility of Elenin causing an earthquake is similarly low.

Finally, the video claims that the “alignments” of Elenin and Earth and Sun were on February 27 2010 and March 11-15 2011. The “alignments” were apparently determined by eye from the JPL orbit widget (http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=elenin;orb=1;cov=0;log=0;cad=1#orb) (which explicitly says not to use the orbit widget for this purpose). Fortunately, there are programs that can analytically determine when the closest approach of the comet too Eath is (when the comet, Earth and Sun are aligned). I use SkyMap (http://www.skymap.com/) with the latest orbital elements. It turns out that the comet was aligned with Earth on 27 March 2010 (nowhere near the Chile Earthquake) and will only next be aligned in May 5 2011 (before closest approach on 16 October 2011, again, nowhere near the Japanese Earthquake). No alignment, no earthquake to explain.

The take home message is to keep a sense of proportion (proportion, get it) and don’t try to estimate astronomical alignments by eye on tiny JAVA animations (oh, and check to see that the guy you are claiming is imaginary really does exist).

*I’m not going to link to the video, if you want to destroy your brain cells, go to this comment (http://astroblogger.blogspot.com/2011/03/comet-2010-x1-elenin-its-just-lump-of.html?showComment=1300208927401#c270645135544840 1774)and copy and paste the URL. On your own head be it.

In short, it's a ridiculous claim based on what we know of physics. She's claiming a gravitational effect at astronomical distances that wouldn't exist if it was even inside the moon's orbit of the earth!

And as for the idea that she predicted anything, let me just reinforce that while this appears like a correct prediction, it doesn't have any rational basis and won't be repeatable. She got lucky.

There's also people who called the stock market crash in '08. But you know what, looking into those people's histories of calling thing, they're actually worse at calling non-disasters than the regular experts. Regular experts don't tend to call disasters, but can certainly predict short-term movements with enough accuracy to make a living managing hedge funds.

We must move society off this pseudoscientific mysticism. It's embarrassing to see someone so ignorant of basic physics that they would make her claim here, seemingly predictive or not.

Let her predict the next 5 earthquakes in both date, location and size and you'd have something real that we'd be crazy not to take a second look at. But fact is, this is the last time you're gonna hear from this girl.

But she'll probably remain convinced she predicted it for the rest of her life.