2002-09-19 3:07 PM

Earthquake Weather

Today it's earthquake weather.

It's hot and dry, a bit hazy and the air is completely, eerily still. Usually there's a breeze coming from somewhere, but not on a day when we have earthquake weather.

Most geologists believe that there's no such thing as earthquake weather. They say that there's no correlation between earthquake weather and actual earthquakes, that "earthquake weather" is regionally defined and happens to coincide with the most common type of weather in each region, and that atmospheric changes don't affect the land at the same depths as most quakes' epicenters.

There's a little anecdotal evidence in favor of earthquake weather being associated with earthquakes, such as this, and one study that found that for one area of California, for one short period of time, quakes did happen more frequently in September than in other months.

And northern California earthquake weather, far from being the most common type of weather, happens at most a handful of days of the year. We had earthquake weather on the day of Loma Prieta. (Though it is described here as "humid" at Candlestick, it was not very humid on the campus of Little Hippie U., which is much closer to the epicenter, and it had that same spooky lack of air movement). By this account, there was earthquake weather for 1906, too, though that kind of weather most commonly happens in September and October and almost never in April.

So maybe there's a correlation and maybe there isn't, but it's a good shorthand for a hot, still and particularly unnerving weather pattern. Plus the cat isn't sensitive to earthquakes beforehand, only after, so I need something to go by.

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