
California Earthquakes Disrupted HF Propagation on West Coast - sciurus
http://www.arrl.org/news/view/report-california-earthquakes-disrupted-hf-propagation-on-west-coast
======
matthoiland
>RF Seismograph showed an increase in noise on 80 meters some 13 hours
beforehand, as well as some propagation changes on 40 and 30 meters — low
before the quake and increasing in its wake.

Hours. Hours beforehand. Having that much preparation would be life-saving.
Especially for us living near the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

~~~
kawfey
Keep in mind that this report has come about with zero peer reviewing (I think
it's a little strange it's been published by the ARRL to be honest), and
another thing that is missing is that it needs to be correlated with solar
activity, operator activity, local noise, and even thunderstorm activity,
among other influences, before one can validate a change in HF propagation is
a precursor to earthquakes.

~~~
jacobush
All these things sound like stuff which can be controlled for.

~~~
colechristensen
Absolutely, but it just needs to be done.

Because there are also a million other correlations with the earthquakes which
are just coincidences.

~~~
lb1lf
-Which is all the reason I need to bring up Tyler Vigen’s amazing spurious correlations:

[https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-
correlations](https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)

~~~
mehrdadn
That's hilarious. Would be cooler if they could limit it to stuff with the
same units though!

------
ljoshua
Most interesting is that interference began _before_ the earthquakes hit. Is
that already a datapoint that is being used in earthquake predictions?

~~~
Raphmedia
Take with a grain of salt. This is pseudoscience at best.

There were some reports of earthquake lights[1][2][3] and earthquake
clouds[4][5][6] recently.

There's some online communities dedicated to those, e.g.
[https://quakewatch.net/predictioncenter/](https://quakewatch.net/predictioncenter/)

___

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light)

[2] [https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/men-film-glowing-
sn...](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/men-film-glowing-snake-
like-16506345)

[3] [https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-
news/789760/Colorado-...](https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-
news/789760/Colorado-UFO-plunge-sky-speed-off-mystery-green-plasma-video)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_cloud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_cloud)

[5] [https://weather.com/vertical/video/strange-clouds-seen-in-
co...](https://weather.com/vertical/video/strange-clouds-seen-in-co-2)

[6] [https://www.denverpost.com/2019/06/20/boulder-rare-helix-
clo...](https://www.denverpost.com/2019/06/20/boulder-rare-helix-cloud/)

Edit: I mean accurate forecasting and prediction using this data is
pseudoscience.

~~~
moftz
What does that cloud formation have to do with earthquakes? That cloud was
filmed in Boulder, not anywhere near southern California. The light thing
seems pretty neat and there looks to be a bunch of possible explanations for
the source. Although some of the videos I watched looked more like flashes of
electricity coming from powerlines snapping or transformers blowing which
could definitely happen if the earth was shifting.

~~~
zamalek
_> What does that cloud formation have to do with earthquakes?_

Last I read about the alleged phenomena, you're supposedly looking for
straight line or ripple clouds that form in seconds. The explanation is that
some mechanism (originally friction) is boiling groundwater; but proponents
can no longer agree on what mechanism leads to formation of the clouds.

~~~
harshreality
Why would earthquakes cause a significant amount of groundwater to boil?

Supposing there were enough water vapor to do that, how would boiling
groundwater form clouds at all, much less in seconds? There's still _a lot of
earth in the way_ between the fault and the sky.

Ground shaking does not mean that energy is converted into heat. Does the
ground feel hot after an earthquake? Warm at all?

Earthquakes, right? Not volcanoes or magma chambers? If this phenomenon were
real, wouldn't you expect it to occur right before a volcanic eruption, which
actually involves large amounts of magma, near the surface, which could
actually vaporize large amounts of groundwater? As far as I can tell, that
doesn't happen either. The water vapor erupts with the molten rock, and mainly
condenses into volcanic clouds because it has volcanic particles to condense
around, not because the water vapor itself is enough to form clouds on its own
before dissipating.

------
mikevansnell
I don't see anything like a blackout: [https://pskreporter.info/cgi-
bin/pskstats.pl](https://pskreporter.info/cgi-bin/pskstats.pl)

For those who don't know, PSK reporter is a system for logging propagation
reports using digital modes like PSK and FT8, mostly on HF amateur bands
(incl. 80,40,30m).

You might expect to see some kind of effect on July 4 if this effect were as
widespread as described in the article, but to my eye it looks like a normal
day.

~~~
joncrane
Oh wow, an old school Perl CGI script! I remember doing those about 20 years
ago. Neat.

~~~
wiml
Serverless lambdas, before they were cool!

------
supernova87a
It's surprising to read about, but not implausible. You put that much stress
on crystalline material over miles and who knows, you could get piezoelectric
kinds of effects creating huge EM fields.

------
rsuelzer
Interesting, this would be a problem for emergency communications set up to
run on HF if it did indeed cause a total blackout. I know the VA out here uses
HF for emergency communications in the event of a major disaster, I believe 80
meters. This would be a problem if a major earthquake killed propagation.

~~~
jupp0r
20m seems to have suffered less, which is good to keep in mind.

------
pwlb
intresting article about the phenomenom:
[http://www.ep.sci.hokudai.ac.jp/~heki/pdf/Scientific_America...](http://www.ep.sci.hokudai.ac.jp/~heki/pdf/Scientific_American_Vance2018.pdf)

------
runeks
What’s HF?

~~~
pizza
High frequency radio band

~~~
bcaa7f3a8bbc
Also known by the public as "shortwave radio" (although only a part of the HF
spectrum is used for commercial broadcasting, but HF and shortwave is
essentially used interchangeably).

------
mnemotronic
So if earthquakes do generate "electric field lines", can we tap into that and
generate electricity from those field lines? And, if so, since that would be
"stealing" energy from the quake, could it diminish the quake intensity?
Theoretically.

~~~
heavenlyblue
Next in the agenda: stealing energy from lightning.

~~~
Ericson2314
[https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/is-
there-...](https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/is-there-a-way-
to-harness-electricity-from-lightning/) TIL a lightening bolt is a nickle's
worth of energy.

~~~
enjo
TIL that 1.21 gigawatts is $.05.

~~~
heavenlyblue
It's 1.21 gigawatts, but only 0.25KiloWatt/hours.

------
tinix
Eric Dollard is giving a talk later this week about this, and he's been
talking about this stuff for YEARS.

Some people here are excited about hours... but this guy can detect these
things DAYS in advance.

Preview:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE3QR3QUUd4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE3QR3QUUd4)

See also:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetotellurics#Earthquake_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetotellurics#Earthquake_precursor_prediction_research)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismo-
electromagnetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismo-electromagnetics)

------
8bitsrule
It's good that people are observing _anything_ ... even including the moisture
content of Yeti skulls, and value of da Vinci paintings ... and trying to
correlate it with _anything_ that can't be predicted and kills people. _Some_
day it _will_ pay off.

There was a time not so long ago when sprites, whistlers, jets, starters, ELVs
and other TLEs were funny stuff. Today we understand that gammas are produced
by thunderstorms. Times change.

[https://physics.unh.edu/events/colloquium/probing-
particle-a...](https://physics.unh.edu/events/colloquium/probing-particle-
accelerator-lives-thunderstorms)

------
plowman
This reminds me of "Earthquake Weather" which I had never heard of until
moving to the Bay Area. Some people who grew up here believe this is a real
thing despite the total absence of evidence.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_weather](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_weather)

------
Raphmedia
Could this be the cause of all bee deaths?

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7220795/Shocking-
fo...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7220795/Shocking-footage-
shows-thousands-dead-bees-7-1-magnitude-earthquake-struck-California.html)

------
blondie9x
I'm not following does this mean the Earthquakes are connected in Vancouver
and Los Angeles?

~~~
Wohlf
Both are on the edge of the north american plate, where it meets the pacific
plate. Everything on the edge of the pacific plate is referred to as the "ring
of fire" due to frequency of earthquakes.

~~~
kwk1
... due to the prevalence of volcanoes.

------
tonymet
If you found this interesting look into getting your ham license it's fun.

------
briantakita
[https://quakewatch.net](https://quakewatch.net) has a track record of
predicting Earthquake risk based on solar activity, space weather, & "blot
echos". They successfully forecasted Southern California as a major risk.

------
gregcrv
It’s probably related to the earthquake light phenomenon.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light)

~~~
RIMR
How can it "probably" be related to something that almost certainly doesn't
actually exist?

~~~
gregcrv
Because if you read the above comments, changes in the ionosphere caused by
earthquakes are scientifically proven. Ionization of the ionosphere is also
what causes auroras. Triboluminescence as another hypothesis is also proven,
you can try in your kitchen with sugar!

