There has been a lot of speculation about animal behavior and trying to predict earthquakes in this area. The other day, the wind stopped and the animals went silent and one of the neighbors said it was “earthquake weather” because of what was going on. No earthquake happened, but we were curious as to how animals react to changes in the atmosphere almost “predicting” when an earthquake might happen. Someone sent Lyndal an article (attached) on some of the tested theories and already known facts about animal behavior.
When earthquakes are stewing, the chemical composition of minerals in the earth’s crust changes and electronic charge carriers are activated in the ionosphere. Silicate minerals known as positive holes flow out of the stressed rock and into the surrounding unstressed rocks and when they get to the surface of the earth they ionize and oxidize water into hydrogen peroxide.
The goats here don’t seem to be drinking enough water and we’ve been trying to think of why and how we could get them to drink more. Here, the sheep’s water troughs are all connected to the rainwater collection sources on the house, however the goats drink from collected groundwater which would be part of the affected areas during an earthquake. We’ve been thinking that if the earthquakes made the groundwater more acidic, the goats would drink more of it if we made it more basic. We put out baking soda in troughs and added it to the water and sure enough they ate and drank it up.
There is some faultiness to the whole animal behavioral reactions to earthquakes, and our experiment didn’t prove a ton for a couple reasons:
-most data about animal behavior during quakes is retrospective, and therefore slightly to mostly inaccurate
-we gave the goats apple cider vinegar which is very acidic and they drank it up
Good news is, they’re drinking more water.
January 20, 2017 at 9:59 am
This is really cool stuff. To think that the animals can taste the difference- that’s stunning. I don’t know too much about geology and the physics of it, but it sounds like the kinetic energy of the shifting plates travels through out and up through the bed rock and discharges the energy as ions into the air. And the animals are sensitive to that? That’s cool.
You’re definitely asking some pretty sweet questions over there. Keep at it! Thanks for sharing~
Shani A