There's No Pattern to How Earthquakes Strike — Except for This One

Carl Sagan’s much quoted opinion about "extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proofs" is sage advice. That kind of evidence has been put on the desks of some of the most respected media fonts on Earth regarding something that, at first, understandably gave them pause: a plain-spoken, easily verified refutation of everything they had ever been told about earthquakes. The table below has elicited some unusually frank commentaries from news venues not known for frivolous analysis:

"This is simple but brilliant observation; impossible to dismiss as coincidence."

— Popular Science, April 20, 2013

"Nabhan is the first individual to go back and check what all those seismic events have in common? The idea that it just took someone to say ‘let’s look back and see if there’s a pattern’ is pretty shocking."

— KERN Radio/Bakersfield Californian, June 3, 2014

"What if I were to tell you that nearly every single deadly Southern Californian earthquake in the past century happened either at dawn or at dusk and during a new or full moon?"

— Paul Magers, News Anchor, CBS 2, Los Angeles, April 20, 2014

CBS News in Los Angeles was extremely reluctant to take a single thing on my word. Their producers called me on three different occasions and went online together with me, demanding on the phone that we access simultaneously this perigee calculator, and that lunar almanac, line by line, date by date, fact by fact. That process ended with their L.A. anchor, Mr. Magers, opening the Southern California broadcast on the date listed above, and making that astounding declaration for over a million viewers. Here is the simple, obvious, unimpeachable truth — the list of those earthquakes Mr. Magers mentions above — that I’d very much like to put in front of Newsmax’s readership as well.

History of Earthquakes in Greater Los Angeles (1933-Present) Causing Fatalities

The calculations concerning the probabilities involved have been checked and re-checked by respected mathematics professors from California to Pennsylvania. The odds that all this is simply "coincidence" are…well…implausible. And, as Albert Einstein said anyway, "coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous."

Whether one is on the West Coast or anywhere else, remaining silent and anonymous in this matter may be a poor course of action. At www.earthquakepredictors.com there is an email link to the honorable California governor’s office giving the public access to make their opinions known. The California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council can and should pass judgment on this. I’ve even offered to pay the bill for their time and trouble if need be — publicly, published in my book below — so that after a century of shoulder-shrugging and back-pedaling this matter can be put right one way or the other.

That table is either screaming a pattern, or it isn’t. If it is, that intimates that Southern California’s long-awaited "Big One" might be somewhat more likely to evidence itself at some future dawn or dusk, hours away from the lunar syzygies. Let’s find out, shall we?

David Nabhan is a science writer, the author of "Earthquake Prediction: Dawn of the New Seismology" (2017) and three previous books on earthquakes. Nabhan is also a science fiction writer ("Pilots of Borealis," 2015) and the author of many scores of newspaper and magazine op-eds. Nabhan has been featured on television and talk radio all over the world. His website is www.earthquakepredictors.com. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.