Alright. I'm a bit of a geophysicist (oil industry though, not seismology) so I figured I would take a look at this to see whether it holds up to any serious scrutiny. I'm also a huge sceptic and a cynic, only moderately prone to sarcasm but I'm gonna do my best here.

It took a bit of work to dig thru the claims he makes. His claims involve planetary alignments serving as a trigger for earthquake activity so that a careful monitoring of those alignments could potentially be useful as a prediction tool. Venus especially when she falls into alignment with outer planets [0], seems to play a large role according to his work.[1]

[0] https://ssgeos.org/articles/planetary-conjunctions-major-ear...

[1] https://ssgeos.org/articles/venus-and-major-earthquakes.htm

It's interesting that he doesn't blame it all on an alignment of the masses of the planets (gravitational trigger) as much as he blames it on electromagnetic forces which he says are stronger and affect the atmosphere during the conjunction. Alrightee.

The twitter post and the youtube video one shouldn't need to waste their time watching are available in the parent comment and in those videos you can find a general prediction. His predictions tend to be slippery. I understand why. The reason is that you need a lot of wiggle room for an earthquake prediction because you will be wrong a lot more than you will ever be close to being right. The key is to flood the market with plausible predictions that statistically have an elevated likelihood of becoming close enough to gain more eyeballs.

The twitter/youtube prediction of note can be found in the nice red box which SnagIt has helped me grab for your edification. [2] It says there will be a series of right angles (conjunctions in his way of looking at the universe) that will set up opportunities for "major seismic activity, potentially peaking mid 7 magnitude around the 30th".

[2] https://postimg.cc/hhCgfdFR

In fact, he updates his predictions as conditions change as you can see in his March 30 update where he gives a 60% likelihood of a 7.0-7.4 quake occurring. [3] Standard procedure is to update when your prediction date passes since by reason and statistics, that means that you're another day closer to it finally coming true. Betting on the inevitable always works if you can spin the calendar far enough ahead without running out of pages.

[3] https://postimg.cc/QF3gBL8W

In earthquake prediction we have to let close be good enough so obviously this is a winner. Just kidding. I decided to take a look at the solar system to see if I could see what he thought he hoped he was seeing. It took me more than one try to find an app that would allow me to unwind the clock back to his setup dates so that I could figure whether any of it made sense.

I found an app called Solar System Scope [4] that allowed me to wind the clock back and forth to watch how it all shakes out up there in the sky and so I SnagIted some screenshots to bracket the relevant days for analysis. I used his prediction to set the bounds as March 27th to April 2nd. Since the quake happened 3 days after his target date I used the 27th as the start and his target as the center date. I hope that makes sense. The next SnagIts show the planetary positions for those three dates and I gave it a good country try to set the time of the SnagIt to the time of the earthquake on each date.

[4] https://postimg.cc/gallery/W36Gxh4

You can see in the Snags that the inner planets Mercury and Venus are rolling around the Sun getting closer to an actual alignment each day that passes and Mars is headed toward that a similar geometry though it is well out of line during those dates. The nearest outer planets Saturn and Jupiter are well out of alignment while Neptune, way the hell out in center field will almost be aligned though it's relative motion will not matter much over such a short time period. Poor Pluto is out of sight to the right and I found Uranus way out in left field in case you still can't find it. Just trying to help.

The most interesting part of this is that all planets except Mercury will be on the far side of the Sun for a few weeks. Mercury, as you can see, will be swinging around the front of the Sun such that by the time we have the total eclipse next week he will be visible to those who have appropriate eye protection in front of the Sun as the Moon eclipses the Sun on the 8th. I SnagIted a shot of that for anyone interested. [5]

[5] https://postimg.cc/vDDK0ytF

Unfortunately I did not get that shot from the exact same perspective as the others since I managed to click somewhere inside that active window and the whole shitteroo shifted on me. I think a reasonable observer can get the idea though that everything is swinging into alignment over the next few weeks and Mercury, like the Moon, will pass directly between the Sun and Earth just like it does regularly, with high predictability.

To me, if his ideas have any merit this might be a better time to predict an earthquake since all this is falling into alignment anyway. The Moon will be passing over Texas and then on up the hill to good ol' New Madrid, Misery, site of one of the most destructive quakes to ever hit North America. It will darken their day for a full two minutes as it passes. With the Moon close by and Mercury's phat mass between us and the Sun while Venus swings to the backside, all we need is a nice coronal mass ejection to provide the electromagnetic pulse needed to kick start the shaker.

Remember though that this method of earthquake prediction doesn't work any better than a rolling, random guess that gets an update every time the previous time window passes without anything of note happening. No one, in my opinion, will predict earthquakes using planetary alignments and end up being right often enough for it to be attributed to skill as opposed to pure shithouse luck. Even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in a while applies here to this method all year long, every year.

Notice that his latest update after the Taiwan quake [6] suggests the possibility of magnitude 6-7 quakes in a few days, but those days don't include eclipse day even though the chart on that same page highlights eclipse day alignments. For some unknowable reason though the chart doesn't mention Mercury in the April 8th alignment group. Probably an oversight or maybe he just lost it in the glare of the Sun. [7]

[6] https://postimg.cc/9whCS4DL

[7] https://postimg.cc/zHCKZR0v

Anyway, while I was here and dinking with it anyway I noticed that we were gonna get a much better mass alignment in a few weeks that might be an even better place to predict something so I thought I would "test" my own skills by winding the clock till I made a nice alignment in the skies. I tried to put all the inner planets as close as possible to a kinda straight line and make the moon be close to centered over the Ring of Fire so that region would feel the strongest tidal forces during this alignment and maybe something would shake loose. This is what I came up with. [8] This date has Earth, Mercury, the Sun, and Venus roughly in a kinda-sorta line while Mars and Saturn line up on the hypotenuse of a really long triangle. Jupiter is still on third base and I know where Uranus is too in case you still haven't found it.

[8] https://postimg.cc/hJ80R6vc

Please don't take anything that I have predicted seriously folks. I am not a seismologist. I am a geophysicist and believe it or not, that doesn't automatically mean I am qualified or competent enough to make predictions about anything.

Personally, this is all bullshit of the finest quality. I wonder why I have wasted so much of my life assembling this tonight. I should've been sleeping.

Since one of his most prominent hedges is the electromagnetic hedge (according to his report it isn't alignments that trigger these quakes, it is electromagnetic energy). He states that we can't measure that electromagnetic energy and this is why it is so hard to predict even knowing all about these alignments.

Of course he is ignoring that we have had satellites measuring coronal activity for decades and there are numerous sites on land where we track solar emissions and monitor auroras.

Just visit Spaceweather.com or Spaceweatherlive.com and you can get your fill of useful data about solar activity that could trigger the atmospheric events that he needs for his predictions to work.

Looking back over the period of his prediction there was a geomagnetic storm anticipated in the days following a March 30 sunspot eruption but that storm watch was cancelled. The current watch suggests a disturbance around April 4 which likely will only affect the polar latitudes if it happens. [9]

[9] https://postimg.cc/gallery/mP2hcHD

Anyway. I can't help but conclude that anyone making predictions, myself included, using the methods that this guy claims to employ probably is the blind squirrel finding the nut when one of those predictions gets close to a real event.