Hi Amit Dave,

I took another look at your forecast page and compared your June 12/13 forecast with that powerful earthquake in the Nicobar Islands area. And your forecast looks impressive. I am not surprised that you got the date correct. Data generated by my own forecasting method (sun and moon location data) point to dates around that time as a high probability time window for an earthquake. But I was surprised that you were able to come that close with the magnitude (7.1 vs 7.5 actual).

Can you explain here how you did the calculations for those specific dates? Did you consider only sun and moon position data or did you also add in planetary position data? And, if you did use planet data, what level of importance did you assign to them?

For people who have not been keeping track of research in this area, this is a brief discussion of the subject matter. I am assuming that Amit Dave is doing his calculations in a similar manner.

When the sun and the moon are in certain positions in the sky, their gravitational pulls on the Earth can cause certain types of earthquake triggering forces to be at a maximum. And if you were to plot the strength of these forces on a chart they would look like an ocean wave. I have done that at my own Web site with the “Wave Charts.” Unfortunately, my charts ran out of data at the end of 2009 and I have not yet had a chance to update the files. That is another entry on an endless list of forecasting projects.

With those types of charts you can identify time widows where the earthquake triggering forces are going to be at a maximum. And if an earthquake is about to occur somewhere anyway then that will be a likely time for it. However, if there are no fault zones ready to fracture then it doesn’t make any difference how strong those triggering forces are. There won’t be a major earthquake. There likely will be some lower magnitude ones.

I believe that this is essentially one of the forecasting procedures that Jim Berkland uses. And in my opinion it is valid within that limitation that I mentioned.

My earthquake forecasting computer program also in my opinion represents a high quality framework for developing this type of technology. And it is my intention to eventually add those high probability time window calculations to the computer program (another entry in the list of forecasting projects).

However, I personally don’t presently believe that the planets’ positions are anywhere near as important to the calculations as the sun and moon positions. As one or more researchers suggested, the planet positions, especially Mercury, could have some impact on earthquake triggering because they can affect the shape of the solar wind. And solar storms hitting the Earth might cause fault zone heating or whatever, and help trigger earthquakes.

It is possible that this is in fact happening. But my own opinion is still that those effects wouild be likely relatively insignificant - as far as how often they occur - in comparison with the triggering effects associated with the sun and moon gravities.