Do Lost Pet Ads Predict Earthquakes?
By Dan Ross, USGS Volunteer for Science, Age 10 and Andrew Michael, USGS This is a neat little thing you can do for a science fair project. A lot of people say that animals run away before earthquakes and some say you can predict earthquakes that way. One way to count lost pets is to count the number of lost pet ads in a newspaper. That’s what we did to see if we could predict earthquakes. You can try it yourself, but first let’s see how Andy and I did it. First, we collected ten dates between 1983 and 1993 where an earthquake occurred with magnitude greater than 4.5 and within 50 km of San Jose. We picked earthquakes near San Jose because we were going to use the San Jose Mercury News to get the lost pet ads. We picked magnitude 4.5 and 50 km so that we got 10 earthquakes in our data set. Then we chose ten random dates to compare to the earthquake dates. The random dates are our control study. We picked these dates by cutting out pieces of cardboard and writing dates, months, and year
