Roger,

Regarding your question – Why look at Afghanistan instead of some other location?

My forecast charts are largely intended to provide people with some idea regarding where earthquakes might occur. And what people should be doing is examining various line peak groups that are pointing to areas where they live to see if some type of seismic activity might be approaching for that area.

Additionally, I do a limited amount of research on the earthquake forecasts myself. And signals that were detected on September 20, 2012 were alarmingly good matches for ones that were detected before the two deadly earthquakes that occurred in Afghanistan back in 1998. I had been able to accurately predict that second 1998 earthquake that occurred on May 30, 1998. And I circulated a global earthquake warning for that general Afghanistan area on May 27, 1998. It is still out there on the Internet somewhere. Had people at the time asked for more information I could have told them exactly where it would occur.

The signals detected on September 20, 2012 were not very strong. And I was not expecting to see a very high magnitude earthquake in the Afghanistan area if one did occur there. But that area is so dangerous it was still worth the effort to circulate a warning.

Fortunately an earthquake that did occur there at the expected time had only a 5.1 magnitude. And that was low enough not to cause problems.

There are EM Signals being detected at an average rate of perhaps 4 per day right now. And I probably detect only 1 in 3 that are being generated. So, most of the fairly powerful earthquakes that are occurring could probably be accurately forecast by researchers working with the right types of detectors. One of them is described at my Web site.

But, there have to be some people who are interested in learning how to detect the earthquakes. And that is generally not the case. Destructive earthquakes occur so infrequently here in the U.S. that no one thinks about them long enough to take any interest in the subject. With no interest there are no research funds made available. And I would expect the funding situation to get worse before it gets better. We shall see.

Earthquakes don’t occur where I live. And I myself spend only part of my time doing this research. I am presently more interested in seeing governments around the world develop better sources of environmentally safe, affordable energy.

These are personal opinions.