The following is much of the text of a report which I just posted to a number of Internet Newsgroups including sci.geo.earthquakes. This is a continuation of a previous thread. A reason for starting a new thread is so that Canie can archive older posts if she wishes without this one disappearing right away.

Data for earthquakes having a 7.0 or greater magnitude for the years 1990 to the present were obtained from a U.S. government Web site. Some of the most interesting from that group of several hundred were the 17 which were listed as having an 8.0 and greater magnitude. I used a sun and moon location data generation program to determine what longitude lines the sun and moon were directly above when those earthquakes occurred. Those data are shown in the following table along with the earthquake date and the number farthest on the right which shows how many degrees (in increasing order) the sun was to the east or to the west of the moon in the sky at that time.

Column 1 - Earthquake date
Column 2 - Earthquake magnitude
Column 3 - Sun longitude
Column 4 - Moon longitude
Column 5 - Degrees difference between the sun and moon longitudes. 0 degrees difference would mean that the sun, moon, and Earth were in a direct line with one another, in that order. 4E would mean that the sun was 4 longitude degrees to the east of the moon in the sky when the earthquake occurred. 4W would mean that it was 4 longitude degrees to the west of the moon in the sky at that time.

1994/06/09 8.2 172E 168E 4E
1994/10/04 8.3 23W 32W 9E
2001/11/14 8.0 35E 24E 10E
2002/11/03 8.5 157W 169W 12E
2001/01/26 8.0 134E 152E 19W
1996/02/17 8.2 94E 69E 25E
1995/07/30 8.0 194E 131E 27W
2000/06/04 8.3 67W 34W 33W
2001/06/23 8.4 128W 93W 35W
1998/03/25 8.8 134E 94E 40E
1995/10/09 8.0 57W 134E 79E
1995/04/07 8.1 151W 62W 89W
2000/11/17 8.2 139W 127E 94E
2000/11/16 8.2 103E 15W 118E
1993/08/08 8.2 53E 67W 120E
1998/11/29 8.3 36W 90E 126W
2000/06/18 8.0 41W 159E 161E

ANALYSIS

Those were all of the 8.0 and greater magnitude earthquakes which I was able to find listed at that Web site for the years 1990 to the present.

The full sun - moon longitude difference range would be 360 degrees. Yet 10 of the 17 earthquakes, more than half occurred when that longitude difference range had values between 40E and 35W, a range of only 75 degrees. So, roughly 59% of the earthquakes occurred within just 21% of the full longitude range.

CONCLUSIONS

(1) I believe that those data provide some fairly good evidence that earthquakes are not all random events. Certain forces or phenomena are at times influencing the times when they occur.

(2) In my first report in this thread I proposed that my data were indicating to me that the time when the sun, moon, and Earth are in a direct line with one another can be fairly important for earthquake triggering. And I believe that the data in this report demonstrate that the probability is fairly high that this is the case.

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