Approved For Release 2000/08/10
: CIA-RDP96-00792R0001 001 2001 3-0
EARTHQUAKES:
THE SOLAR
CONNECTION
BY PATRICK HUYGIIE
A maverick scientist
is shaking up quake predictors by
suggesting
that
solar
flares
trigger
seismic
activity.
Editor’s
note: Much
to the consternation of her colleagues,
a California scientist believes the sun may trigger such diverse
calamities as earthquakes, human illness and arson. Officials charged with earthquake prediction have encouraged her even as
scientists scoff. Is this researcher a pioneer in the tradition of Galileo or is she just another overeager soul who has misinterpreted
her data to
fit her pet theory? Here
is her story. After you have read
it, decide whether you believe
all, parts or none of
it.
cologists understand the action
of plate tectonics perhaps bet-
ter than any other aspect of the
earthquake-generating process.
The one great mystery that re-
mains is knowing precisely when one tec-
tonic plate will break free of another and
set
the Earth’s crust
to crumbling. The
key to solving that mystery lies in isolat-
ing the final nudge that upsets the balance
of frictional
forces locking the edges of
the plates together.
Biologist Marsha Adams,
38,
thinks
she may have found that key 93 million
miles away from the Earth in the hot, tur-
bulent atmosphere of the sun. Moreover,
Adams, who
is
at SRI
International,
a
nonprofit California think tank, has data
she says indicate that certain people can
somehow
sense
the
forces
that
trigger
earthquakes before they occur.
“I didn't start out as a sun freak,” says
Adams candidly. “But I’ve come to real-
ize that almost all variations that occur in
biological and physical processes may be
the result of fluctuations in solar activity.
I have to think very hard to come up with
one that
isn’t.
1 suspect that geophysical
Biologist Marsha Adams, seen standing on
the San Andreas Fault,
links solar flares
(top) to health problems as welt as quakes,
processes—including
volcanoes
and
weather fronts --are related to solar activ-
ity in some quite comprehensible way.”
Adams’s journey to solar consciousness
began a decade ago in a basement: labora-
tory of the Stanford Medical
School,
where the young biologist was conducting
a study of cardiac stimulants on embryo
chick hearts.
Once the study was completed, Adams
prepared
to
present
her
results
to
the
American Heart Association, but just
a
few weeks before she was
to do
so, her
results
reversed
themselves.
Instead
of
stimulation, the embryo chick hearts be-
gan exhibiting depression. Assuming the
experimental setup was at
fault, Adams
dismantled the entire system and changed
the platinum
electrodes,
the stock
solu-
tions and the air tanks. No matter what
she did, she couldn’t replicate her results.
Soon
after,
though,
for no
apparent
reason,
the experiment
began
to work
again. Although they watched several of
these reversals, neither she nor her super-
visor could explain what was happening.
Having taken
into account
humidity,
temperature and all the other factors that
biologists usually control in their experi-
ments, Adams was left with only one con-
clusion: "The chick embryo results were a
clue that something
in the environment
was profoundly
influencing biological
processes, but at the time
1 didn’t know
where to look for the something.”
Adams then began to accumulate other
instances of biological
variability.
In
11,000 cases of measured surgical bleed-
ing,
for
example,
she
noticed
that
the
measurements of blood
loss varied. She
screened these cases against a variety of
factors
in
the geophysical environment:
cosmic radiation, several measures of geo-
magnetic and solar activity and a number
of standard
weather
variables
such
as
barometric pressure, temperature and rel-
ative humidity. She found that the bleed-
ing anomalies occurred following periods
of increased solar activity and preceding
large-magnitude earthquakes.
The clinical staff at the Women’s Com-
munity Clinic
in San Jose, where Adams
was
then
research
director,
wasn’t
sur-
prised, she
says. “They said they could
have told me that because everything goes
haywire around there a few days before
an
earthquake.
People
in
the
recovery
room showed
an
increase
in
emotional
disturbances and there was an increase in
the number of people vomiting and react-
ing
to
anesthetics. They didn’t have
to
look
at
the data to
teli when an
earth-
quake was coming. When
I
challenged
them to predict the next earthquake, they
did, and the bleeding data showed the ex-
pected anomalies.”
(Ipctiitig photograph by Roger Ressmeyer; solar-flare photograph courtesy of NASA
Approved For Release 2000/08/10
: CIA-RDP96-00792R0001 001 2001 3-0