In doing more work on the data, the most exciting thing is that the earthquake pattern correlated with the Mars-Sun aspect cycle in a highly distinctive way. All aspects on which Mars was closer to conjunction with the Sun (ie when Mars was on the other side of the solar system from us) had above average numbers of earthquakes, without exception. Conversely, all aspects closer to Mars opposite sun had below average numbers of quakes. Of the 1826 quakes listed in the reference period 1901-1994, 490 were during the Mars opposite Sun half year and 1337 were in the Mars conjunct Sun half year, as shown on the attached diagram. On the null hypothesis of no planetary effect, these groups would be equal, but the conjunct half has 2.7 times as many quakes as the opposition half. The data evidences a large clear link between tectonic cycles and Mars-Sun aspects.
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Originally Posted by Ray Murphy
it would be handy to know what magnitude of quakes you used.
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The quakes are as listed on the link in the opening post. They all appear to be above 4 magnitude. I will email you the list of 1826 dates I used, which are all the useable dates since 1901, excluding those which only give a year or month.
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Originally Posted by 01101001
We look forward to your actual data rather than the conclusions you jumped to, but I suspect that what all the data will actually show is that by cherry-picking the right planets as "influences" you can find that the random events of (a chosen subset?) of large earthquakes can be made to be more, or less, frequent during certain portions of the planet's or planets' orbits.
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I have sought to be comprehensive and methodical in this study, by looking at the data for all planetary aspect pairings. The finding as explained above shows that 01101001’s skepticism is easily answered. I would welcome advice from BAUT regarding provision of data, as the full excel spreadsheet I have prepared is rather large, and my previous experience is that there is little interest in data even when offered.
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Originally Posted by Chris K
Some interesting findings there, Robert. I would be concerned about the data since early 20th century data might be more selective and perhaps more dependent on earthquakes occurring near population centres. Have you compared the frequency of earthquakes with the normal distribution one would expect from the planetary cycles you mention? There may be some astronomical artifacts here that skew the data from what one might expect.
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More quakes are recorded in the latter part of the century. However this data weakness does not influence the annual Mars effect. One would normally expect that earthquake dates are random, so artifacts can be ruled out.
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Originally Posted by Ray Murphy
I've got about 4,000 earthquakes here and I've just noticed that before 1900 the magnitudes were only approximate. This dataset also has most of them for the period 1967 to 2003.
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Very happy to share data. I started in 1901 because the excel date function does not work before then.
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Originally Posted by Ray Murphy
I thought that the scientists had made it clear that gravity associated with distant planets could theoretically only have miniscule impact.
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This is precisely why I am raising this issue on ‘Against the Mainstream’. The earth and mars are ‘sister planets’. It seems from this data that they have a connection evidenced in earthquake frequency. I argue a miniscule physical effect over two billion iterations (the number of earth-mars conjunctions since the dawn of the solar system) can establish a harmonic rhythm which is much more powerful than a one-off arrhythmic effect.
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Originally Posted by Ray Murphy
When you say "Mars was on the other side of the Sun" I assume you mean MAR opposite SUN by zodiacal longitude. If so, then you must have made a mistake somewhere because that configuration (with any orb) is reasonably rare and couldn't show up more often than a theoretical average (which shouldn't be used anyway because of the normal uneven distribution).
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Apologies if this was not clear – by Mars on the other side of the sun I mean the 50% of the time when Mars is closer to conjunct Sun than opposition. When Mars is opposite Sun in the zodiac it is on the same side of the solar system as earth.
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Originally Posted by Hornblower
That is interesting that you mentioned tiny, distant Pluto, but not the mother of all tide-raisers after the Sun and Moon, namely Venus at inferior conjunction. Suppose for the sake of argument that the repetitive tidal stretching and squeezing of a fault that is already near the breaking point indeed is the "straw that broke the camel's back". I would look for a correlation with the highest tides during the general period, which would be spring tides with the Moon near perigee. If the perigee point is crossways to the Sun at any given time, the spring tides will be significantly lower. Even if all the planets were perfectly lined up with the Sun, creating their equivalent of a spring tide, they would not be able to offset that reduction. Have you taken the Moon's perigee position into account in your analysis? None of this takes into consideration that no two faults are going to be alike. I would be flabbergasted if the San Andreas and Anatolian Faults, to name a couple of big ones, had the same time constant in their response, if any, to repetitive tidal stress. In my opinion you are seeing nothing but statistical flukes. That is assuming you are doing the statistical analysis correctly, which I have no way of judging one way or the other.
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My findings are not theory determined but are purely empirical. I too would have thought Venus would have a bigger effect than Pluto, but I did not see it in the data. As in my previous planets and rain study, my method was to list all earthquake dates then (using Vlookup on excel) link this list to all planetary positions for those dates, and for each planetary pair, divide the 360 degrees of the circle into sixty segments and count the number of earthquakes in each segment. e.g. for the Mars-Sun aspect cycle, 30 segments are closer to conjunction and thirty are closer to opposition. The result as quoted above is far too improbable to be a statistical fluke.
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Originally Posted by JustAFriend
...so how come there are earthquakes when the planets AREN'T aligned?????? Methinks your logic has some gaps you could drive a starship through....
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I am not suggesting planetary influences are a principal cause of earthquakes, only that they have an effect which is easily statistically detectable.
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Originally Posted by Serenitude
Interesting. Mr. Tulip, how would your theory change if I told you that the person standing next to you exhibited a greater gravitational impact upon you than the planet Jupiter when it is on the opposite side of the sun, let alone our own Moon? Also, if I told you that earthquakes are more likely to happen on days that I've eaten a Strawberry Pop-tart vs. a Blueberry Pop-tart, would that not then, using your logic, naturally suggest that Strawberry Pop-tarts play some undefined, "straw breaking the camel's back" role in Earthquake activity?
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Hi serenitude, I think I have answered your questions already. I am not primarily expressing opinions about when earthquakes should occur, just studying the data on when they actually occur. Pop-tarts have not shared synchronous orbits with the earth for five billion years, so are less likely than Mars to produce observable and easily replicable results of the sort I am presenting.