Earthquakes are ground movements, and like wild storms, they are a natural phenomenon. Earthquakes can bring disaster to humanity. According to statistics, more than 5 million earthquakes occur in the world every year, of which about 1,000 are destructive earthquakes. In order to avoid or reduce such disasters, it is extremely important to do a good job in predicting and forecasting earthquakes.
Animals that can predict earthquakes. In the long-term earthquake reporting and earthquake resistance work, people have observed that many animals have various abnormal reactions before the earthquake: animals do not enter the circle, dogs bark, hibernating snakes make rat noise, ducks do not go down to the water chickens on the trees, bees fly on the fish, parrots hit caged pigeons and fly in shock, lions and tigers roar wolf howls, and so on. Through the practice of predicting and predicting earthquakes, the people of China's Xingtai area have also compiled such proverbs: "Chickens are making trouble in the nest, pigs are jumping in the circle, sheep are running dogs, and the earthquake is coming soon." ”
From a large number of seismic data, there are about 100 species of animals known to have abnormal reactions before earthquakes, including insects, fish, frogs, snakes, birds, mammals and poultry and livestock. Among them, dogs, fish, cats, chickens, birds and pigs react most obviously.
At 13:24 on July 18, 1969, a 7.4 magnitude earthquake occurred in the Bohai Sea of China. Before the earthquake, the staff of Tianjin People's Park observed that many animal behaviors had abnormal reactions, and even the usually cute giant pandas were lying on the ground, holding their heads and screaming, calling it unable to afford, but there was no disease in the examination. Based on these abnormal reactions, the park's earthquake forecast team reported the forecast of "a major earthquake that may occur" to the Tianjin Earthquake Prevention Office at 11:10 on the same day. Sure enough, two hours later, an earthquake occurred, and the ground in Tianjin shook.
On February 4, 1975, a 7.3-magnitude earthquake occurred in Haicheng and Yingkou. Some time before the earthquake, despite the cold weather, hibernating pythons crawled out of the hole, and they froze as soon as they came out of the hole. In addition, the early awakening of hibernating animals such as frogs and loaches may be related to the local increase in pre-earthquake ground temperature.
At 3 o'clock on July 28, 1976, a strong earthquake of magnitude 7.8 occurred in Tangshan and Fengnan areas of Hebei Province. The abnormal animal reactions before the earthquake, like the previous major earthquakes, are very common and strong, especially in the hours before the earthquake.
Japan is a country with many volcanoes and earthquakes, and scientists have found that the abnormal behavior of fish in the deep sea predicts that earthquakes are coming. As early as the summer of 1923, a Peruvian ichthyologist found a species of whiskerfish floating up on the coast of Hayama in Japan, which only inhabits the deep sea, which is an anomaly. The next day, the Great Kanto Earthquake occurred. In the early morning of November 11, 1963, fishermen in Niishima, Japan, caught a 2-meter-long deep-sea fish, and in order to cover the news, a TV reporter invited Professor Wei Hiroshi, who was studying the abnormal behavior of deep-sea fish before the earthquake, to go to the scene with him in a helicopter. At that time, Professor Wei Guang could not go to the class, and when he was separated from reporters, he joked: "Please be more careful, there will be an earthquake soon." "Who knows, two days later, there was a real earthquake near New Island."
Dogs, probably because of their particularly sensitive sense of smell, are listed as the animals with the most pronounced pre-earthquake responses. On the eve of an earthquake in the Tonghai region of Yunnan Province, four people from a family in the mountainous area sat around a table and were playing poker with great interest. Suddenly, a dog ran in from outside the gate and barked at the owner, who only cared about playing cards and ignoring it. The dog was in a hurry, went up and bit his master's clothes, and dragged him outside the door. The owner felt that the dog was ignorant of affairs and was very embarrassed, so he drove him out of the gate. But as soon as he sat down to play cards, the dog came in again, still biting his clothes and desperately dragging his master outside. At this time, the owner was annoyed, stood up and kicked the dog randomly, and rushed out of the gate together. At this moment, there was a sudden roar, the earth trembled, the house collapsed, and the 3 people who remained in the house were crushed to death, but he saved his life. Before the Tangshan earthquake, a wolf dog from a farmer's family bit its owner that night and prevented him from sleeping. The owner beat the dog away, and just after falling asleep, the dog came to bite again. He was angry and frightened, so he got out of bed and beat the dog, chasing and fighting, just out of the gate, the earthquake occurred. On July 23, 1973, before the earthquake in the then czechoslovak city of Spiekoe, a female clerk was asleep and was woken up by a dog. The dog licked her master's face, bit her pajamas, and dragged her out of bed. She opened the door, and the dog ran out with his master's pajamas, just stepping onto the sidewalk, when an earthquake struck. From these three examples, it can be seen that dogs are not only excellent live seismometers, but also have a saviour in earthquake disasters.
Why do animals predict earthquakes. Earthquakes are one of the phenomena of huge energy releases from the Earth's interior. Someone has calculated that the energy released by a magnitude 7 earthquake is equivalent to the energy released by more than 20 20,000-ton atomic bombs, so there must be various physical, chemical and meteorological changes before the earthquake, such as geothermal, geoelectric, geomagnetic, light, sound, climate, and groundwater chemical composition will have certain local changes. These changes, even very slightly, are very sensitive to some animals, causing them to react physiologically and behaviorally, which is the abnormal behavior of animals before the earthquake.
At present, although it is known that some animals can predict earthquakes, the mechanism of their prediction of earthquakes is not fully understood. According to Professor Yu Kuai, a zoologist at Shanghai Normal University, there are the following three explanations and speculations in science:
First, the feeling of ultrasound and infrasound. Fish and other aquatic animals can feel ultrasonic and infrasonic waves that humans cannot feel. The average person can feel the sound wave range of 160,000-20,000 Hz, children can reach 22,000 Hz, above or below this sound wave range can not be felt. Fish have lateral line receptors in the inner ear and on both sides of the body, which are mechanical receptors that can sense infrasound waves (sound waves with frequencies below 20 Hz) from 1 to 25 Hz, and are sensitive to even small changes in the pressure of water flow or weak fluctuations in water flow; Jellyfish (jellyfish) have sensory balls at the edge of their umbrellas and can feel infrasound waves of 8 to 13 Hz. The jellyfish floating on the surface of the water can feel the infrasound waves generated by the friction of the flowing air with the waves before the storm arrives, so they leave the shallow sea in time to avoid the disaster of being smashed by the huge waves; Dolphins in the ocean can feel the sound waves of 500,000 to 100,000 hertz, and have a perfect sonar system. As a result, it can use ultrasonic waves (sound waves with frequencies above 20,000 hertz) to correctly track fish thousands of meters away and can distinguish species. It can be seen that the cause of abnormal reactions of fish and some other aquatic animals before the earthquake is likely to be related to the occurrence of infrasound waves and ultrasonic waves before the strong earthquake.
Second, high sensitivity to changes in heat. Before the earthquake, burrowing animals had obvious abnormal reactions. For example, snakes have buccal fossa or sensory fossa, and the sensory cells inside the fossa are extremely sensitive to "heat". Someone has done an experiment with a Python in South America, and when the heat is 0.084 joules per square centimeter under the infrared line with a wavelength of 10600 nanometers, there is a thermal sensory response. It is speculated that the abnormal reaction of snakes before the earthquake may be related to geothermal changes.
Third, the feeling of weak mechanical vibrations. Poultry and birds have tiny vibrating bodies on their legs, whereby they can feel very weak mechanical vibrations (tens to one to two kilohertz) on branches or on the ground. The Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences once did such an experiment: 100 domestic pigeons were divided into two groups, each group of 50 pigeons, and the nerves linked between the sensory body of one group of domestic pigeons and the central nervous system were cut off. As a result, before a magnitude 4 earthquake, one group of domestic pigeons with severed nerves was basically quiet as usual, while the other control group of domestic pigeons flew away. This shows that the small body of the domestic pigeon can feel the fluctuations before the earthquake. Before the strong earthquake, pigs, cattle, sheep and other livestock generally had abnormal reactions. It may be related to the fact that their legs, toes, and the mesentery of the abdomen are distributed with a large number of annular bodies that are very sensitive to feeling mechanical vibrations.
In addition, bats can feel 1500-150,000 hertz sound waves. Its ultrasonic positioning system is extremely superior, not only high resolution, but also strong anti-interference, can receive the signal reflected from small insects from the noise background that is 200 times higher than the signal. Therefore, the movement of bat amplitudes before the earthquake is related to the feeling of ultrasound.
According to Professor Helmut Tribchu of the University of Berlin, the release of charging ions from the ground causes a "first earthquake" that causes nervousness in dogs, pigs, birds and other animals, which is the abnormal behavior of animals that people often observe before earthquakes.
So, can humans foresee earthquakes? For a long time, many scientists believed that humans did not have the ability to foresee earthquakes like animals, and only animals could feel the changes in the pre-earthquake outside world that humans regarded as "static". Later, a scientist in California first proposed that humans can also behave abnormally in the short time before the earthquake, just like some animals. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, residents experienced signs of irritability, irritability, dizziness, headaches, and nausea in the 72 hours before the earthquake. Because each person's physiological and psychological conditions are different, the signs that appear are also different.
Not long ago, Biologists MaSha and Adams at the Tim Institute in the United States, according to the analysis of human abnormal behavior before the earthquake, the accuracy of the forecast can reach 80% in 8 days. Adams attributed people's abnormal behavior before earthquakes to changes in the geomagnetic field affecting the results of the human body.
Further exploration of animal earthquake reporting will have a great role in preventing earthquakes. First of all, in the work of animal earthquake reporting, it is necessary to distinguish whether the abnormal behavior of animals is caused by earthquake warning or other factors, otherwise it will cause false earthquake reporting. Because natural phenomena are very complex, some changes in environmental conditions that are not indicative of earthquakes can also promote abnormal behavior in animals, and are often similar to the abnormal reactions that occur before earthquakes. For example, in sweltering weather, before thunderstorms, due to low air pressure, high humidity, and reduced dissolved oxygen in the water, fish will flood ponds, dragonflies and mosquitoes will fly in groups, and ants are also busy moving to high places, showing abnormal behavior. Another example is that before the arrival of storms, large flocks of seabirds will fly towards the landing ground, many fish will float in groups, deep-sea fish will swim to the shallow sea or even float to the surface of the water, and even cetaceans will flock to the surface of the sea. Another example is the change of feeding conditions, including the change of the animal house, the change of the breeder, and the change of feed type, which often causes various abnormal reactions of the animal. In addition, animals will also show behavioral disorders due to their own physiological changes during the breeding season. When pigs, horses, cattle, sheep, etc. are in heat, they are often irritable, have a poor appetite, and chase each other; Dogs have the phenomenon of howling during estrus, cats often bark during estrus, and fish will reproduce and swim back. These abnormal behaviors are not related to earthquakes.
Secondly, animals with abnormal behavior before the earthquake are often individual species and a small number of animals at the beginning, and will also be affected by individual differences in animals, and there will be no abnormal reactions, abnormal reactions and obvious three situations in the same kind of animals, which will also bring difficulties to animal earthquake reporting work, so we must pay close attention to the types, quantities, scope of abnormal reactions and the degree of abnormal reactions in animals. Because without a certain number it is impossible to make a correct judgment.
Third, the use of animals to predict earthquakes is a new research topic, the relationship between changes in animal behavior and earthquakes, not much is known at present, and it must be further explored in the future earthquake prevention and earthquake resistance work. Experts from turkey's "Cat Lovers Association" have found that the soles of cats can feel the slightest vibration, which can be known about the arrival of earthquakes earlier than humans and ordinary animals, and the sense of smell and hearing of cats is also quite acute, so some scholars have listed the cat's "sixth sense" (including cat prediction of earthquakes) as a research topic. Japanese scientists according to the folk "catfish turn over is a sign before the earthquake" legend, after a long period of observation, found that the fish to the slight vibration of the feeling is extremely sensitive, and the change in the weak current caused before the earthquake, can also be felt by the catfish particularly sensitive receptors, so many places in Japan are raised catfish, as a living "seismometer", at any time to observe its every move. In addition, Japan's Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry also called on people in earthquake-prone areas to raise a white fish, which has a special ability to sense small vibrations——— and a few hours before the earthquake, it was frightened in the water, indicating that the earthquake was coming. After the Xingtai earthquake, China has conducted long-term systematic research on more than 10 kinds of animals in the area, such as dogs, rats, pigs, chickens, pigeons, loaches, yellow eels, crucian carp, and locusts, focusing on observing the indicators of animal responses, such as the startled flight response of pigeons, the changes in the daily respiratory rate curve of cats and abnormal behavior reactions, etc., from which the law was summarized and some experience was obtained. Using these experiences, many good predictions have been made for earthquakes with a range of 50 kilometers and a magnitude of 3 to 5.