Hi all;

There's been some discussion on another board about a paper by R. G. M.
Crockett which claimed that the Sumatra quake was related to syzygy. When this got cited as evidence supporting JOB, naturally I had to take a look.

I used the NEIC database from 1973-2006 and wrote a program to search for quakes of the desired size range and count them in a 15 day array consisting of 7 days either side of the relevant syzygy (new or full moon).

I also added a chi-square test against the average number per day. With 14 degrees of freedom it takes a chi-square of 29.01 to reach the 0.01 level.

Here's what I found:

Mag 0-3.99 quakes, 1973-2006
311 329 324 326 328 349 352 321 314 355 324 336 361 319 341
Chi-square is 10.2 with 14 degrees of freedom.

Mag 4.0-4.99 quakes, 1973-2006
1607 1758 1577 1573 1583 1635 1601 1716 1697 1852 1966 1771 1563 1666 1609
Chi-square is 113.97 with 14 degrees of freedom.

Mag 4+ quakes, 1973-2006
2204 2316 2139 2112 2120 2230 2153 2330 2229 2482 2610 2359 2169 2246 2197
Chi-square is 121.54 with 14 degrees of freedom.

Mag 5+ quakes, 1973-2006
597 558 562 539 537 595 552 614 532 630 644 588 606 580 588
Chi-square is 28.31 with 14 degrees of freedom.

Mag 6+ quakes, 1973-2006
32 33 40 31 20 49 39 31 35 36 38 33 41 36 33
Chi-square is 15.99 with 14 degrees of freedom.

Mag 7+ quakes, 1973-2006
5 2 4 5 1 5 2 4 6 3 6 3 6 3 3
Chi-square is 9.24 with 14 degrees of freedom.

This shows that the effect is primarily from mag 4 quakes with a little
help from the 5s.

Now look what happens when the Sumatra time period is removed.

Mag 4+ quakes, 1973 to mid-Oct, 2004
1187 1321 1149 1191 1165 1214 1138 1170 1150 1211 1226 1162 1134 1178 1163
Chi-square is 25.96 with 14 degrees of freedom.

it's marginally significant but it's due to a peak in day -6. This proves
that all we have is an anomaly. The Sumatra quake and some of its' aftershocks
just happened to fall near syzygies.

Roger