The Sixth Sense of Animals: An Early Warning System for Earthquakes?

Can animals predict earthquakes using their sixth sense?

Is it true that animals can sense a quake?

Some experts disagree about whether earthquakes can be exactly predicted. Nevertheless, animals seem to sense the impending danger hours in advance. For example, there are reports that wild animals leave their sleeping and nesting places immediately before strong quakes and that pets become restless. However, these anecdotal accounts often do not stand up to scientific scrutiny because the definition of unusual behaviors is often too unclear and the observation period too short. Other factors could also explain the behaviors of the animals.

In order to be able to use animal activity patterns as a kind of early warning system for earthquakes, the animals would have to show measurable behavioral changes. Moreover, if they do indeed react to weak physical changes immediately before an earthquake, they should react more strongly the closer they are to the epicenters of the quake.

On the other hand, some who believe animals can sense quakes point to work done by Friedemann T. Freund, who is a senior research scientist at the non-profit SETI Institute (which is searching for extraterrestrial life). He has postulated for decades that rapid stresses in the earth’s crust just before a quake cause major changes in magnetic fields, which animals can sense. Michael Blanpied, associate coordinator of the U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program says these theories “have been roundly questioned and criticized,” because rapid stress changes would not be expected before a quake, and because such changes were never observed or recorded outside of Freund’s lab.

Freund remains undaunted. In 2015, he and co-researchers published a study showing that animals in Peru’s Yanachaga National Park basically disappeared in the weeks leading up to a 7.0 magnitude quake in the region in 2011.

Can Animals Predict Earthquakes?

Animals are able to detect the first of an earthquake’s seismic waves—the P-wave, or pressure wave, that arrives in advance of the S-wave, or secondary, shaking wave. This likely explains why animals have been seen snapping to attention, acting confused, or running right before the ground starts to shake, Blanpied says. Also, some animals—like elephants—can perceive low-frequency sound waves and vibrations from foreshocks that humans can’t detect at all.

Before the behavior of animals can be used to predict earthquakes, researchers need to observe a larger number of animals over long periods of time in different earthquake zones around the world to prove this type of method can be a suitable prediction for the next earthquake that happens.

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