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  • 2016-11-08 (xsd:date)
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  • Rare Supermoon Is Going to Unleash Tidal Waves and Massive Earthquakes (en)
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  • On September 28 2016, the conspiracy blog UFOsightingshotspot presented two unrelated stories as if they were part of the same news item. One reported on an upcoming supermoon event, and the other discussed a recent seismology study that looked for evidence that lunar cycles may partially predict earthquakes. The connection implied by conflation of the two stories, although not explicitly made on the UFO blog, was amplified by other outlets such as the UK's Daily Star tabloid, who wrote: Supermoons occur when the Moon is simultaneously full and at the closest point to Earth in its orbit (a phenomenon known as perigee). As reported by NASA, the supermoon on 14 November 2016 will be the largest one (i.e., the one in which the moon approaches closest to Earth) since 1948 and will not be surpassed until 2032. The information about the connection between earthquakes and lunar cycles is less set in stone, so to speak. The paper the conspiracy post references is an authentic study published in the 12 September 2016 issue of the scientific journal Nature Geoscience. In that paper’s introduction, the scientists noted that the possible correlation between seismic activity and lunar cycles has been a long-standing debate in seismology: This study added to that body of research by investigating stress caused by the tidal pull of the moon prior to a number of major earthquakes worldwide, as reported by the Washington Post’s Sarah Kaplan: As noted by the researchers, these periods of stress would be most marked during either a full moon or a new moon when the Sun, Earth, and Moon are generally aligned (an orbital arrangement known as a syzygy). In the researcher's model of how tidal stress and earthquakes might interact, those periods of high stress make it more likely that minor, deeper fractures will propagate into larger catastrophic events: This conclusion is a far cry from the reported suggestion that the 14 November supermoon, specifically, will cause tidal waves and earthquakes, as the study did not make a single mention of these events. The study is also still preliminary: Furthermore, the difference in tidal stress caused between a supermoon alignment and a run-of-the-mill syzygy (which occur at periodicities of 14.8 days) is probably negligible since tidal forces themselves are fairly minor, as discussed by Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait: In 2011, NASA Goddard Space Center chief scientist James Garvin responded to similar questions about a possible supermoon-tectonics connection, concluding that it was unlikely to have much of an effect at all: (en)
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