Subject: Toads Tell About The Chinese Earthquake.
May 14, 2008.
If you look at the following website you can
see all the pictures about this story.
I hope someone will send this information to
my friend Jim Berkland, because I don't have his
e-mail address.
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From: a-exa
Subject: Did toads have predict the China quake?
http://observers.france24.com/en/content/20080513-toads-predict-earthquake-dead-china
..........
According to recent estimates, the earthquake that
hit China on Monday could leave
http://www.france24.com/en/20080512-death-toll-3000-beichuan-sichuan-china-earthquake
10,000 people dead. (JW That figure will probably go
up as time goes by.)
Web users are saying that the catastrophe could have
been avoided, if only they had listened to the toads.
Two days before the quake thousands of toads suddenly
decided to move across a bridge in Taizhou, a town in
the Jiangsu province (see photos). Chinese web users
are wondering why the local authorities didn't relate
the event to the imminence of an earthquake, and why
scientists didn't take notice of the bizarre
disappearance of a lake in Enshi, in the Hubei
province, on April 26 (see photos).
A seismologist tells us that the Chinese have long
relied on the behaviour of animals to predict
earthquakes. Although there's no scientific study to
back up the farmers' claims, the idea that toads sensed
the earthquake should not be ruled out.
The contributors
"View user details."
http://observers.france24.com/en/profile/20080513-pascal-bernard
"Pascal Bernard's picture"
"Animals sense pre-earthquake micro-tremors"
Pascal Bernard is a researcher in a team of
seismologists at the Jussieu University in Paris.
Although it's difficult to prove that toads
"predicted" the quake, it's certainly not impossible.
We know that animals sense pre-earthquake
micro-tremors, and react to underground water
movements, or even changes in the composition of the
air. It's just that these theories haven't been
scientifically proven yet.
China has a long tradition of seismology studies
based particularly on looking at the behaviour of rats,
snakes, toads etc. The idea was very fashionable in the
70s [when scientific researchers were ousted in the
cultural revolution]. Farmers very carefully noted down
all the different kinds of behaviour of animals in the
hope of predicting natural catastrophes. But in my
experience it never really worked. In 1975, villagers
did manage to predict an earthquake and avoid
catastrophe. But it was because they felt the
mini-tremors, not because of something they noticed in
the animals."
Swamped by toads in Taizhou (Jiangsu province)
10 May 08. Via Chinese website
http://news.qq.com/a/20080511/001202.htm
A pond disappears in Enshi (Hubei province)
April 26. Via
http://news.qq.com/a/20080505/003537.htm
Resulting in a good catch for a fisherman.
"first comment_add"
"Share your thoughts and opinions related to this
posting."
http://observers.france24.com/en/comment/reply/18940#comment-form
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(JW IMHO this is caused due to the fact that animals,
birds and toads are directed by a group intelligence,
group spirit, mother nature or whatever you want to
call it that tells them to leave and area if it
is going to be hit by a large earthquake. Millions
of people could be saved if they used this information
in the Los Angeles area if a very large earthquake
should hit them or all along the Calif. coastline and
the San Andres Fault.)
John Winston. johnfw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jim Berkland The Man Who Predicts Earthquakes.
May 14, 2008.
I consider Jim Berkland to be my personal friend. I
had him on the Community Channel TV that I hosted in
the past, in San Jose, Calif. called Science-Faction.
I was once in his home while Stanton Friedman, the
expert in UFOs was there. Jim and Stanton's wifes are
sisters and Stanton visits and stays in Jim's home
while he is lecturing in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Here is an interview that a person made of Jim
Berkland.
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Interview with James Berkland
James Berkland is a geologist who worked for the
United States Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) from 1973 to
1994. He is well-known for his controversial earthquake
prediction methods that include calculating the number
of missing pets ads in the newspapers of
earthquake-prone areas.
Berkland’s interest in geology began as a child, as
he says his dad was a `rock-hound'. After earning his
BA in Geology at U.C. Berkeley in 1958 he went directly
to work for six years with the U.S. Geological Survey,
involving laboratory and fieldwork throughout the
western United States, including Alaska. Then, after
earning his Masters degree in Geology at San Jose State
University in 1964 he accepted the position of
Engineering Geologist with the U.S. Bureau or
Reclamation, based in Sacramento, and for the next five
years worked on engineering projects involving the
storage and moving of water at a number of dam sites,
tunnels and canals in California and Oregon.
Berkland worked on his Ph.D. in geology at the
University of California at Davis until 1972, and
although he passed his Ph.D. orals, he didn’t complete
his dissertation within the required seven years.
However he published more than 50 scientific papers,
many of which utilized his Ph.D. studies, including a
paper delivered at the International Geological
Congress at Montreal in 1972.
Berkland was Assistant Professor of Geology at
Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina
until 1973, where he shared in the discovery of
evidence for Pleistocene glaciation in the Southern
Appalachians. Berkland then moved backed to California
and worked for the U.S.G.S. for over twenty years. He
was the first County Geologist for the most populous
county in northern California, Santa Clara County.
Besides helping to establish geologic ordinances widely
held as models in the field, Berkland served on many
committees and advisory boards.
He also held a position for two years as an adjunct
professor at San Jose State University, and he received
distinguished member awards from the Santa Clara County
Engineers and Architects Association and the SABER
Society at San Jose State University.
Berkland claims that he can predict earthquakes with
over 75% accuracy by calculating the number of lost pet
ads in the newspaper, and observing the lunar-tide
cycles. He has been meticulously saving and counting
lost pet ads for many years, and he says that the
number of missing dogs and cats goes up significantly
for as long as two weeks prior to an earthquake.
Berkland also noted that many earthquakes occurred at
the time of maximum tidal forces associated with the
twice-monthly alignments of the Sun and Moon. In the
70s he began to make informal predictions, scoring six
out of eight during 1974, including the 5.2M
Thanksgiving Day Quake of November 27th. This one hit
the day after he had predicted it at a meeting of
U.S.G.S. geologists, and it synchronistically shook him
and his daughter while they were attending the movie
Earthquake.
Despite Berkland’s successes in earthquake prediction
he found it almost impossible to publish on the subject
in scientific journals. His career began to suffer
although his credentials included fellowship in the
Geological Society of America and membership in the
Association of Engineering Geologists, Earthquake
Engineering Research Institute, American Association
for the Advancement of Science, Sigma Xi Science Honor
Society, Peninsula Geological Society, Seismological
Society of America, and others.
Gravitational variations due to the lunar cycles, he
says, create `seismic windows' of greater earthquake
probability.
When the number of missing pets also suddenly rises,
then a quake is likely to happen. Berkland said he
thinks the U.S.G.S. won’t accept unusual animal
behavior data because it doesn’t fit with their current
scientific paradigm. (Researchers who attempt
earthquake prediction are often lumped into the same
category as fortune tellers and scam artists by
traditional geologists.) It is not surprising then to
hear that Berkland was suspended from his position as
Santa Clara county geologist for claiming to predict
earthquakes--such as the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in
Northern California, which was preceded by numerous
reports of odd animal behavior.
When I did the research for Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s
book Dogs That Know When Their Owner’s Are Coming Home,
I set out to replicate Berkland’s findings, and I sat
in the Santa Cruz Public Library for several weeks
counting the Lost Pet ads in the San Jose Mercury News
microfilm collection. I confirmed that Berkland’s
calculations were indeed correct; there was a
significant rise in the number of missing dog and cat
ads in the weeks prior to the 1989 quake. The trouble
was that when I checked the number of missing pet ads
for the year before, during the same time period, there
was also a rise--yet an earthquake didn’t follow the
rise that year. So more counting needs to be done to
determine whether seasonal effects might influence this
phenomenon or not, but it does appear that Berkland is
on to something significant with his method.
Berkland has made many media appearances. He was
interviewed on the Art Bell radio show, and has
appeared on Frontline, Sightings, Strange Universe,
Northwest Afternoon, Town Meeting, Bill Cosby Show, The
Other Side, Two at Noon, Evening Matinee, Jeff Rense
show, George Putnam Show, Mitch Battros Show, Laura Lee
Show, and many other broadcasts. In 1991 he was
featured in the Farmer s Almanac, and his annual
predictions are now published in the Dot Tide Tables.
Berkland also publishes his predictions in a
newsletter called Syzygy, and he maintains Quakeline, a
900-line telephone information service that was
originally nationwide, but is now restricted to the
San Francisco Bay Area. To find out more about
Berkland’s work visit his web site:
www.syzygyjob.com
I interviewed Jim at his home on November 1, 1996,
when he was living in San Jose, California. Jim is a
very friendly guy, and he gets very enthusiastic when
he talks about geology and earthquakes. We spoke about
his career in geology, his methods of earthquake
prediction, and what he thinks the animals are picking
up on that is causing them to disappear prior to
earthquakes.
David: How did you get involved in earthquake
prediction?
James: As a county geologist I came out here in
September of 1973, directly from Appalachian State
University, where I was a Assistant Professor for a
year. But I'm a native Californian, raised in the Bay
Area. I was born down in Glendale, but we moved to
Somoma Valley when I was six years old.
David: How did you first become interested in
geology?
Why don't we start with that.
James: Well, my dad was a rock hound, and I was
brought up in the country, with animals and hikes,
hunting and fishing all around there. I'd see different
terrain, and pick up rocks, different pretty rocks,
stick them in the pocket. My dad was interested in lots
of things, and was frustrated in a number of ways. He
was an electrician, a store-keeper, and never had gone
to colleges. He almost started in medicine, but didn't
continue in it.
I went directly from high school to a local Santa
Rosa Junior College.
Then I was going to work for six months and earn
money to go to Berkeley in forestry, but it turned into
almost six years. I worked at the biggest industry in
Sonoma County, which is Sonoma State Hospital for the
mentally retarded. I almost didn't get out of there. It
was handy, only a mile a way from where I lived, and I
had kind of a pleasing job. It was like having Boy
Scout troop. I would take the kids up in the hills for
hikes and things.
Of course, my colleagues there were tickled, because
suddenly instead of 120 kids on the ward, there would
have maybe 75 or less. It was a lot easier to handle
while I was away for four or five hours. I would pack
the kids lunches, and go up and fish up at the creeks.
We'd look at the wildlife, and turn over rocks to see
what's underneath. So I finally I decided there's got
to be a little more.
I'm trained for more than this. It was easy, but it
wasn't challenging, and there was so "many things that
I was interested in, but couldn't seem to follow up on.
So I went down to become a forester.
Part 1.
John Winston. johnfw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jim Berkland The Man Who Predicts Earthquakes.
Part 2. May 15, 2008.
I have been told how to contact Jim Berkland by one
of my friends. I contacted him, he wrote me back
a nice e-mail and I sent him the information about
the toads reqarding the Chinese earthquake.
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When I got to Berkeley in the middle of Spring
semester it turned out that I'd already received all of
the prerequisites for upper division, and there were no
more courses available to me, without taking the
forestry field camp, involved in measuring logs, timber
country, and working in a logging mill. So I said,
well, what does that pay,?
Well, no, they said, you pay us. It costs you $200. I
said, no, next summer I've got to work again. Well,
sorry you can't take any upper division classes until
you've had this summer field camp. Well, my buddy was
taking geology at Berkeley, and he said, we don't have
to have our geology field camp until the end of our
senior year. So because all of the prerequisites were
identical I just shifted right into geology, and never
looked back. After two years at Berkeley I went
directly to the U.S.G.S., where I worked as a
non-professional for almost six years, maybe a little
over, during 1958 to 1964.
David: Had you earned your Ph.D.?
James: No, I just had a bachelors. I thought, well,
I'll just work at the U.S.G.S., work my way up, show
them what I can do, gradually become a geologist, and
go from there.
Well, it turned out, it didn't work that way. To get
with the U.S.G.S. you pretty much had to have a Ph.D.,
except under times of national emergency or something,
when they hired a few people with bachelors during the
uranium boom because they needed feet to go out there
and walk around.
But there was no way that I could advance. I could
have worked as a technician for my whole life there. So
I went back to school, got my master's at San Jose
State, and then just after I'd completed that suddenly
the offers began coming. I could be going to the State
Water department, or Bureau of Reclamation. Then the
U.S.G.S. wanted me possibly to go up on an ice island
by myself for six months, just to make bottom
measurements on arctic ice flow, check their
radioactivity, and atmosphere-- just read instruments
all by myself, until the ice got cold enough in August
or September to freeze up and they could land the
plane.
Well, anyway all these things came down, but I had
made a decision and signed up with the US Bureau of
Reclamation as a professional engineer and geologist. I
worked with them for over five years, in dams, tunnels,
and canals in Oregon and California mainly. At this
time came the revolution in Earth Sciences-- the plate
tech tectonic in evolution. But from all of my courses
through Santa Rosa Junior College, Cal Berkeley, and
San Jose State, plate tectonics was just a figment of
the imagination. It was just coincidental-- that word I
hear all the time-- that it looks like you could fit
South America and Africa together. There's no
mechanism. It's just some wild idea from this German
geographer, who is not even a geologist. So what's he
know about this continental drift?
So it was laughter that was associated with the
theory. My professor would always talk about it, show
the map, and ha ha. You know, there's this idea some
geographer believed, but it really doesn't make any
sense. We'd have to change our whole understanding
geology developed over the last 200 years if we were to
accept this. Well, so be it. But they didn't accept it
until the late 60's after notable conference at
Monterey, where they brought geologists from all around
the world. They now had space-age data, bottom -of -
the-sea data, new fossil data, and it all began to
jive. They realized that we're not all little islands;
everything in it connects at some point. The unified
theory of geology developed at that meeting in 1969.
Well, it was too much for me to avoid anymore. I'd
been getting little glimpses of this from talking to
people, and seeing things in the paper, or the
Geological Society Bulletin. But when I last left the
U.S.G.S. in 1964 they didn't buy it at all. There was
no such thing as continental drift. Movement of the
magnetic pool might explain things, not the movement of
continents- So that also added fuel to my
understanding, with light to my understanding about
seismic windows.
David: How did you get interested-involved in
earthquake prediction?
James: I came out from deciding I wasn't going to
spend the rest of my life back on the east coast, when
all of my previous life was here. I told my wife don't
bother to come back with the little daughter, because
I'm coming back to California. So I came, without a
job.
We'd taken a tour around the country, and after we'd
got back to my mother's place up in Sonoma County,
there was a little postcard from San Jose's County. Mr.
Berkland, if you're still interested in this job you
might come for an interview.
I had flown out to take the orals in February of 73,
by then in June my appointment was over back there, and
they wanted me to come back. I said, no, I'm going back
to California. We had a couple of possibilities, but
they dwindled. And I hadn't heard from the county. So
here's this postcard-- if you're really interested,
call us by August 31st, and this is like September 2nd.
So not to leave any stone unturned I called up the
county engineer, and I said, well, I just back from the
east coast, and I'm available now if that position is
still open. Yeah, c'mon down. I'll prompt you.
So next day I come down and talk to him, and three
days later I'm County Geologist, the first one for
Santa Clara County, the first one in Northern
California ever. They had most of the major counties in
Southern California, and they have their own staff of
County Geologists. But not here, and there was a crying
need for one, because of the geologic hazards, the
landslides and earthquake problems, and subsidence
developing under the Santa Clara Valley. So for the
first few months I was interested- through the
earthquakes I felt, and several others that had been
reported to me in the Bay Area-- but not until January
8th. 1974. after I'd been there for six months, did it
all begin to jive.
I saw an article in the newspaper that we might
expect local flooding around the San Francisco Bay due
to an unusual astronomical alignment. I got out my
almanacs. (I've always been an almanac buff.) Say, what
is this? First full moon of the year on January 8th was
on the same day as the closest perigee in about eight
years. And the two events were only an hour and a half
apart. Very unusual for them. What I call
"synchronaity", that close together; between the
syzygy-- the lining up-- and the perigee- closest
approach. That was causing extreme tides. Also, it was
just a week after the closest approach of the earth and
the sun, the perihelia, that happens once a year, in
through January.
So that combination was close to the conditions of
January 4th, 1912, when we had the maximum force in 600
years. This was the maximum force in several years. And
I thought, huh, if the ocean waters are being pulled up
and down by the gravity, and the earth is sort of
rotating underneath the bulge of water and high tide.
Then six hours later it's over here where there's a
deficiency of water, and then six hours later it's down
under here, another bulge. So that's why you have two
high and two low tides a day.
I didn't understand all that, really. I didn't have
the geometry that clear. In fact, I wasn't really sure
what the difference between a new moon and full moon
was. All I knew was they were lined up. The clearest
analogy is that if the moon is rising just as the sun
is setting, that's when you have the full face of the
moon lit up. like the sun's a big flashlight. So you
see the full moon, but if the moon is up here at the
zenith, when the sun is rising or setting, it's obvious
you don't see the whole face of the moon. You can only
see the part that's near the moon.
So that's full moon. When the moon rises and the
sun's setting, that's best you can do. And you might
even get an eclipse, and that's a perfect syzygy. I
love the solar eclipse. I've seen three, and I expect
to see another one in February of 98. I went down to
the Galapagos Islands, and up into the Caribbean. It'll
be a beautiful total eclipse, lasting over four
minutes. We saw the ones in Mexico in 91, and I flew
down to Peru in 94 and saw the one there. The first one
I saw with my daughter back in 79, with the last one to
hit the United States, 48 states. There won't be
another one here until 2017. I hope I'm still here.
David: How did you notice that the association
between this and earthquakes?
James: Okay, so I said, hey if that's causing the
ocean tides to go up, maybe the solid earth has a tide
in it. Indeed it does, about three feet.
Part 2.
John Winston. johnfw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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