Hi Donald,

Let me clarify this a bit.

(1) It has been proposed that solar and/or geomagnetic storms might be having some influence on earthquake occurrence time.

(2) Another somewhat related theory would be that geomagnetic storms at times result in one way or another from earthquake fault zone related activities in the days or weeks before an earthquake occurs.

With theory # 1 regarding the solar – geomagnetic influence, a storm would not cause an earthquake to occur unless a fault zone somewhere was getting ready to fracture on its own anyway. And then the storm might just accelerate the triggering time by hours, days, weeks or whatever. If there were no fault zones anywhere which were about to fracture then nothing would happen.

The next step in testing that theory would be to divide solar storms into different types, photon, electron, proton, and CME.

The two which might be easiest to study would be the electron and proton storms.

I am not an expert on this, but if I have correctly understood what I have read, with these solar storms the sun can send concentrated jets of electrons - negative charges or protons - positive charges (or both) towards the Earth. Because of their much lower mass the electrons would arrive first when both are sent.

Theories propose that the proton storms would suppress earthquake triggering and the electron storms would encourage triggering to occur earlier and perhaps even affect an earthquake’s magnitude.

Going a step farther, the orientation of the magnetic field of the arriving storm is also supposed to be important. If it has the same directional orientation as the Earth’s magnetic field it does one thing. If it is in the opposite direction it does something else.

And going another step, the location where a solar storm hits the Earth and other locations might be important.

I would expect that the protons storm and perhaps most CMEs would not do anything that we could observe. How can you tell if earthquakes are being suppressed? And at the moment it would probably be too difficult (for me anyway) to watch for magnetic field orientation and storm impact location effects. But if electron storms are encouraging earthquake triggering then on occasion we might be able to observe some significant earthquake activity during and following one.

So, what I have been saying is that with all of these strong storms we have been having lately, this could be a good opportunity to see if any of those theories are valid.

Additionally, I am proposing that we could also watch for reports of Ear Tones etc. when these storms occur. And I can add some data regarding that subject matter right now. Ear Tones were detected after that latest strong CME which I believe included a proton storm.

It looks like we might now be in a period of higher than average electron storm activity. And the Ear Tones have now completely stopped. I thought that the opposite would happen.

Fairly large numbers of other types of warning signals are being detected right now. I expect that this is related in part to the sun and moon being close to one another in the sky. Fault zones at different locations around the world might be a little more active for the moment.