The following are my personal opinions.

The 130.html Web page at my Freewebz.com Web site has now been adjusted to the point where the information it contains should be understandable by just about anyone who has some formal scientific training. And I am now planning to begin discussing that subject matter with other scientists around the world.

For the benefit of EarthWaves board posters and visitors I will say the following:

It is quite difficult to do any important research in the area of earthquake science unless you are a professional in the area. This is partly because there has already been a tremendous amount of work done in countries that we know about. And it appears that there is even more research which has been done in countries such as the People's Republic of China which has not yet reached U.S. researchers.

That has been the situation up until now.

From what I can tell, the 130.html and 90-03.html Web pages at my Web site represent the door opening to a relatively new area of earthquake research including earthquake forecasting research.

The reasons that this field of science has not been studied extensively in the past are complex. One problem has been that if you look at large groups of earthquakes your data can tend to look random. However, if you study particular earthquake subsets as I have been doing such as the most powerful ones then you can start to see clear trends. The data are no longer random. And those subsets are not simply normal data aberrations. They can be statistically significant if you are just a little careful about what you study.

So, what this means is that board posters and visitors are now in a position to do some significant research without having to devote their lives to this or even choosing geology as a career. And that door is not expected to remain open for too long.

For example,

On that 130.html Web page I have a chart which shows how the Wave Chart technology being discussed there could have been used to obtain some information regarding when 5 destructive earthquakes might occur. However, I have not yet had time to begin looking at significant U.S. earthquakes. And we have had a number of them such as the ones in Northridge and Seattle.

Could the Wave Charts have predicted when aftershocks for those U.S. earthquakes might occur? Were those earthquakes themselves the aftershocks of other earthquakes?

Can people link the Ear Tones they are detecting with earthquakes by using the Wave Charts?

Can you compare Wave Chart and RingMap data and find earthquakes which both technologies say something important about?

All of the information needed to answer those types of questions should now be available at that Web site. People can copy some of the GIF files and print them out or use them with drawing programs. After that you simply follow the instructions for drawing lines on the Wave Charts.

As with just about everything connected with earthquakes, the science behind this is complex. My drawings etc. point to 4 different sun - Earth - moon alignments as being higher probability times for earthquake aftershocks to occur. But research will undoubtedly show that those relationships are highly dependent on the earthquake fault zone environment and the time of the year and perhaps even the time of the decade.

So as I said, this is a new area of science. And there are unlimited numbers of questions like those to be answered.

SUMMARY: The Wave Charts do not presently predict earthquakes. Their purpose is in part to provide us with some information regarding when higher probability earthquake and aftershock triggering time windows are likely to occur.

• Using the Wave Charts to forecast earthquakes