[Skywise]

Quote:Roger said:

Since certain prediction ideas involve triggering at
special distances I decided to look into it.

I wrote a program which looks at all mag 7.5 quakes as
main shocks (large enough for distance triggering) and
mag 6+ as possible triggered quakes.

The program finds a mag 7.5 quake, then calculates the
distance to all subsequent quakes within a year. These
are added to an array of 1 degree bins from 0 to 179
degrees.

This continues until no more main quakes are found.
The array sums are then printed to a file for
examination.

I expected only minor differences in the counts but
such was not the case. For example there were no quakes
in the degrees from 0 to 38 but 128 in the 39 degree
bin. The largest count of 1520 was at 127 degrees and
there were none farther than 163 degrees.

I have no explanation for this. Anybody have any ideas?

Hi Roger. Answering your question from elsewhere.

Given a random distribution I would expect a bell curve centered on 90 degrees. However, earthquake locations are not distributed randomly. They cluster along plate boundaries.

Since most large quakes occur around the Pacific, and looking at a globe you could probably fit a circular ring around the ocean that would cover most of the Ring of Fire, I have a hunch that 127 degrees is close to a distance that would include a larger number of these quakes thus moving the hump from 90.

Brian