Smut Clyde was supposed to write a scholarly paper about the papermill citation market he was investigating for quite a long time. There was lots of material, but Smut couldn’t help but get distracted by a certain topic, like a kitten by a ball of wool. So now you will have to read about earthquake prediction quackery and how it evolved into a citation business for Pakistani papermillers.
Somehow even Michael Persinger makes an appearance. And Freud, but not that one.
By Smut Clyde
“However entrancing it is to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images, are you not enticing your mind from another subject of almost equal importance?”
Which is to say, the proprietor of this blog is concerned that I spend all my time in explorations of the transactional-citations marketplace and all the mockademic fictional genres drawn into its accretion disk, instead of finishing my scholarly monograph on the topic, or writing guest-posts. For that marketplace is a labyrinth as large as the academic world, and the Ariadnean thread that traces the path back out of its interior seems to sprout subsidiary threads that lead into plant-based green nanoparticle synthesis or some other side-alley of parascience.
Stolen from Oglaf in accordance with the prophecy
In defence of those endless explorations, without them I would never have encountered an especially deranged realm of the scientific demimonde: a domain of modern-day augurs and haruspices – though rather than entrails and the movement of birds across the heavens, the workings of their divinations are mysterious glows, and plasma bubbles in the ionosphere. I refer, of course, to earthquake weather-forecasting as a research field.
Some history is in order. Forty-odd years ago, Helmut Tributsch revived the classical omen-scrying tradition with When the Snakes Awake (1982). He argued that earthquakes have atmospheric / electromagnetic forerunners from the accelerating slippage and cracking of rocks underground, which alert animals on account of their wider sensorium and greater sensitivity, so they behave out-of-character. Like Suleiman-bin-Daoud, animals “understood what the rocks said deep under the earth when they bowed in towards each other and groaned”. Birds flee the area, dogs bark1, snakes emerge prematurely from brumation2, frozen turkeys walk backwards across the ceiling, hamsters update their Wills. As for cats, my experience is that they have no more prior awareness of seismic agitation than I do, and are equally surprised, glaring at the house-apes in accusatory you-had-just-one-job disappointment at our failure to forestall it.
A decade earlier still, The Jupiter Effect (1974) warned of the Californian superquake, which would ensue from the coming alignment of multiple planets on the same side of the sky. The tidal pull of the minor planets upon the sun, piled upon the dominant pull of Jupiter, would stir up sunspot activity to unprecedented levels; this (according to the prophecy) would engage with Earth’s core (with the ionosphere and the magnetic field as intermediaries), accelerating Earth’s rotation by some infinitesimal amount – or slowing it, perhaps – enough to add a straw of pressure to the camel’s back of the San Andreas Fault, so the mountains will skip like rams and goodbye Los Angeles.
It is an unlikely, Rube-Goldberg-worthy concatenation of causality steps, but it could happen. Except that it evidently didn’t. Or if it did, the scale of the catastrophe was more than human consciousness could endure and we collectively agreed to efface the trauma from our memories. And John Gribbin was quietly advised that his career as a Serious Science Writer would benefit from labelling his science-fiction fantasies more clearly in the future.
I couldn’t decide whether to link to Blue Öyster Cult or Queen, so you get both!
Alternative title #1: The Shadow over California
Alternative title #2: The earth will shake, in two will break (listen to the madman)
Gribbin’s brainfart stands slightly aside from the main earthquake-prophecy tradition, but his ionosphere-to-core-to-lithosphere insight was adopted in an arsey-versy way. For the Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling hypothesis (LAIC) holds that turmoil and great tohu-bohu in the outer fringes of the atmosphere are driven by events in the mineral kingdom (vaster than empires, and more slow). As below, so above!
So we are back with the atmospheric correlates of subterranean stresses.
Image by ScienceResearch – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
One mechanism, promoted by Friedemann Freund, relies on the semiconductor quality of mountains. For granitic rocks are rich with quartz grains, SiO2, which in turn contain peroxy defects in the crystal structure. These generate positive conduction-band vacancies when stress is imposed and slippage occurs; the ‘p-holes’ (I did not choose the name) propagate grain-to-grain through the rock as far as the surface, where they transmute into O3+ ions to continue their rapid ascent to the ionosphere (following, it may be, a kind of homing instinct). The process has acquired the uncharitable label ‘Freund Physics’, but this didn’t deter a ‘QuakeFinder‘ company from working with him.
If you don’t like that mechanism, don’t worry, there are others! When Pulinets and Ouzounov (2004) coined the LAIC label they invoked radon, accumulating within the primordial rocks of continental shields with the slow decay of thorium, only venting to the surface when the movement of the rocks opens pores and fissures. Radon is itself radioactive, so after rising to the upper atmosphere it ionises and warms its neighbouring atoms there – hence, temperature anomalies (not to forget the heating effect of the global ground / ionosphere electric current). The pores and fissures release an aerosol of finely-comminated metals at the same time, hence nucleation and earthquake clouds.
Fig 10 [left] makes everything clearer and is totally not an evil robot
Nor can we exclude electrostatic charges and electromagnetism from the simple piezoelectricity of quartz crystals under directional pressure. That only requires the quartz grains in the granite substrate to align coherently so they can pool their infinitesimal piezoelectric contributions.
At any rate, these different schools of seismancy agree on the critical point: there will be a signal to herald each major earthquake, visible in the torrent of real-time data that pours from satellite sensors and GPS transmission strength and ground-based radar in the manner of a fire-hose, documenting every aspect of ionospheric and tropospheric weather: temperature, ionisation, density of clouds and electrons. An alternative to Tributsch’s animal-sense early-warning system.
So the good news is that such data come by the bushel-load. The bad news is that the Dark Arts of AI are required to extract the signal from the noise; the plethora of data must be processed, massaged, enhanced (“Prepared”. “Treated.” “Diced”). One must feed it into the hopper of the sausage machine Electronic Oracle of Machine Learning, and it is no good asking what lies inside the Black Box for the answer is always “Pain”.
More classic science-fiction earthquake porn
What emerges from this research is that accompanying or preceding each major quake, buried within the data, there is indeed a clear-cut geophysical indicator or anomaly. The seismancers have successfully post-dicted many notable episodes of seismic agitation of the last five years (although there is no telling how many they weren’t able to post-dict because no anomaly could be found). But it’s a different indicator each time, so only recognisable in retrospect. Their failure to predict any episodes at all is regrettable but outweighed by the involvement of neural networks.
This absence of tangible, ensuring results is not the only trait shared with broader parascience manifestations like biologically-inspired optimiser heuristics, or simulations of nanofluid and hypersonic flow, or extensions of fuzzy logic. In all cases the authors know that what they’re publishing is pointless symbol-shuffling makework, so they have no respect for the papers they sign, and pimp them out as citation-delivery vehicles. Which is how I stumbled across the genre. Here are the papers identified so far, starting with the papermill works by Munawar Shah, assistant professor at Institute of Space Technology in Islamabad, Pakistan, sometimes accompanied by a certain Sayed M. Tag Eldin:
Muhammad Muzamil Khan, Bushra Ghaffar, Rasim Shahzad, M. Riaz Khan, Munawar Shah, Ali H. Amin, Sayed M. Eldin, Najam Abbas Naqvi, Rashid Ali Atmospheric Anomalies Associated with the 2021 Mw 7.2 Haiti Earthquake Using Machine Learning from Multiple Satellites. Sustainability (2022) doi: 10.3390/su142214782
Abdul Qadeer Khan, Bushra Ghaffar, Munawar Shah, Irfan Ullah, José Francisco Oliveira‐Júnior, Sayed M. Eldin Possible seismo-ionospheric anomalies associated with the 2016 Mw 6.5 Indonesia earthquake from GPS TEC and Swarm satellites, Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences (2022) doi: 10.3389/fspas.2022.1065453
Muhammad Umar Draz, Munawar Shah, Punyawi Jamjareegulgarn, Rasim Shahzad, Ahmad M. Hasan, Nivin A. Ghamry Deep Machine Learning Based Possible Atmospheric and Ionospheric Precursors of the 2021 Mw 7.1 Japan Earthquake, Remote Sensing, (2023). doi: 10.3390/rs15071904 Munawar Shah, Rasim Shahzad, Muhsan Ehsan, Bushra Ghaffar, Irfan Ullah, Punyawi Jamjareegulgarn, Ahmed M. Hassan Seismo Ionospheric Anomalies around and over the Epicenters of Pakistan Earthquakes, Atmosphere, (2023). doi: 10.3390/atmos14030601 Munawar Shah, Rasim Shahzad, Punyawi Jamjareegulgarn, Bushra Ghaffar, José Francisco De Oliveira-Júnior, Ahmed M. Hassan, Nivin A. Ghamry Machine-Learning-Based Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling Associated with Mw > 6 Earthquakes in America, Atmosphere, (2023) doi: 10.3390/atmos14081236
Rasim Shahzad, Munawar Shah, M. Arslan Tariq, Andres Calabia, Angela Melgarejo-Morales, Punyawi Jamjareegulgarn, Libo Liu Ionospheric–Thermospheric Responses to Geomagnetic Storms from Multi-Instrument Space Weather Data, Remote Sensing (2023) doi: 10.3390/rs15102687
Syed Faizan Haider, Munawar Shah, Bofeng Li, Punyawi Jamjareegulgarn, José Francisco De Oliveira-Júnior, Changyu ZhouSynchronized and Co-Located Ionospheric and Atmospheric Anomalies Associated with the 2023 Mw 7.8 Turkey Earthquake, (2024). Remote Sensing, doi: 10.3390/rs16020222 Husan Eshkuvatov, Bobomurat Ahmedov, Munawar Shah, Dilfuza Begmatova, Punyawi Jamjareegulgarn, Angela Melgarejo-Morales, Exploring Electromagnetic Wave Propagation Through the Ionosphere Over Seismic Active Zones, Pure and Applied Geophysics (2024). 10.1007/s00024-024-03532-x Muhammad Qasim, Munawar Shah, Rasim Shahzad, Punyawi Jamjareegulgarn Atmospheric precursors from multiple satellites associated with the 2020 Mw 6.5 Idaho (USA) earthquake, Advances in Space Research, (2024). doi: 10.1016/j.asr.2023.09.057 Amna Hameed, Munawar Shah, Bushra Ghaffar, Salma Riaz, Punyawi Jamjareegulgarn, Nassir Saad Alarifi, Mostafa R. Abukhadra Possible atmospheric-ionospheric precursors of the 2020 Hotan China earthquake from various satellites, Advances in Space Research, (2024) doi: 10.1016/j.asr.2024.06.016 Sohrab Khan, Munawar Shah, Punyawi Jamjareegulgarn, Ahmed M. El-Sherbeeny, Mostafa R. Abukhadra, Majid Khan Remotely sensed atmospheric anomalies of the 2022 Mw 7.0 Bantay, Philippines earthquake, Advances in Space Research, (2024). 10.1016/j.asr.2024.12.013
Zaid Khalid, Munawar Shah, Salma Riaz, Bushra Ghaffar, Punyawi Jamjareegulgarn Atmospheric precursors associated with two Mw > 6.0 earthquakes using machine learning methods, Natural Hazards, (2024). doi: 10.1007/s11069-024-06562-9 Junaid Ahmed, Munawar Shah, Talat Iqbal, Muhammad Ali Shah, Ayaz Amin Study of the ionospheric precursors associated with M w ≥6.0EQ from Ionosonde Stations and GIM TEC Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, (2024). doi: 10.1016/j.jastp.2024.106205
Syed Faizan Haider, Munawar Shah, Nassir Saad Alarifi, Mostafa R. Abukhadra The 2023 Mw 6.8 Morocco earthquake induced atmospheric and ionospheric anomalies, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, (2024).doi: 10.1016/j.jastp.2024.106323
Munawar Shah3 is the common author across those 14 papers, but with #15 – an unpublished preprint – the link is his frequent collaborator at Institute of Space Technology in Islamabad, Rasim Shahzad. And there are earlier Shah papers on this problematic topic – as recently as 2021 – but they do not bear a burden of citation payola to attest to the authors’ bad faith.
Zeeshan Haider, Jianguo Yan, Rasim Shahzad, Najam Abbas Naqvi, Zohaib Afzal, Jean-Pierre Barriot GNSS TEC and Swarm Satellites for the detection of Ionospheric Anomalies Possibly associated with 2018 Alaska Earthquake, Research Square (2023). doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3626187/v1
The executive summary, for readers who don’t want to click on the links or zoom in on the screen-grabs, is that a cohort of ‘citation magnets’ managed to infiltrate each paper’s References section. Somehow the yawning gaps where relevance should be went unnoticed by editors and reviewers (and, indeed, by the authors).
For example, we have 9 papers by M Shah or M Santosh (read June 2024 Shorts) or other authors citing “Seismic performance analysis of a wind turbine with a monopile foundation affected by sea ice based on a simple numerical method” by Huang et al, 2021.
Below, each link is to a PubPeer search on that magnet’s title, to show how many other papers have been flagged on PubPeer [SO FAR] for citing it inappropriately as they bestrew citations hither and yon in citational lolly-scrambles. Some of these magnets are veritable super-conductors, attracting citations from no end of unrelated fields.
20 papers citing “CLVIN: Complete language-vision interaction network for visual question answering” by Chen et al, 2023. 33 papers citing “Smoothed LV distribution based three-dimensional imaging for spinning space debris” by Zhuo et al., 2022.
Others, less powerful, draw their citational booty from a more circumscribed academic genre that at least relates to remote-sensing, and (if not to earthquakes per se) to anthropogenic disasters like landslides and droughts and flash-floods and particulate air-pollution. I thought that Remote Sensing as a research area was safe from the depredations of organised science-crime, but I was wrong.
39 papers citing “Mapping winter crops in china with multi-source satellite imagery and phenology-based algorithm” by Tian et al, 2019 44 papers citing “Garlic and winter wheat identification based on active and passive satellite imagery and the google Earth engine in northern China” by Tian et al, 2020 11 papers citing “Seismic performance assessment of unsaturated soil slope in different groundwater levels” by Huang et al, 2021
Artist’s impression of Goblin Citation Market
It is conceivable, of course, that the separate authors of #1 to #15 decided independently to make a deal with a citation broker to pad out the References section with a supercargo of absurdly irrelevant, recurring passengers. The alternative is that a single scrivener churned out the whole portfolio of papers, spurious citations and all (or outsourced that task to a studio) then auctioned off the co-authorship slots; but I could not possibly speculate.
But I forgot the Earthquake Lights!
Alternative title #3: And we saw St. Elmo’s Fire, Splitting ions in the ether
Earthquake Lights (EQL) reports are worldwide in distribution. They go back a long way: events during an 869 Jōgan earthquake are adduced for the cause, and before that there was the 502 CE ‘Fire-in-the-Sky’ cataclysm that levelled cities in Lebanon. Photographic evidence had to wait until 1965 when T. Kuribayashi was out at night with his camera during the Matsushiro earthquake swarm.
Fig 7 from Enomoto et al. (2017)
Are these the p-holes releasing their energy prematurely, close to the vents as they emerge, rather than saving them for the ionosphere? Ball lightning from piezoelectricity, or a St Elmo’s Fire phenomenon? Enomoto, Yamabe & Okumura (2017) have a somewhat more involved theory that includes exoelectrons and water / CO2 flow through hydromechanical ruptures. Meanwhile Robert Sheaffer suggests that before entertaining explanations for EQLs, we should give them a consistent definition – a consensus about their appearance and timing – but that’s because Sheaffer is a sourpuss and grumpyface.
From the 1988 Saguenay quake, in a previously-inert part of the Laurentian craton
Skipping over episodes 1 to 49.
Don’t worry, none of this will be in the exam. I mention the EQLs because they bring us back under the aegis of Michael Persinger, good friend of For Better Science, whose 2018 demise diminished us all but especially impoverished the realms of heterodox, outside-the-box thinking. For Persinger was occupied in the 1970s and 1980s with an interminable series of papers that wove EQLs into his all-embracing Tectonic Strain Theory (TST). These were Persinger’s first tentative forays down the road to perdition away from the scientific mainstream; his free-wheeling cognitive style had not yet led him to the dough EEGs and the ionospheric memory archives that distinguished his late-career speculations.
Michael Persinger’s crank magnetism
Orogeny recapitulates ontogeny: A typical scene in Persinger‘s laboratory at Laurentia University
The TST holds that the continental tectonic cratons like Laurentia are the heartlands of the paranormal Fringe (or vice versa), rife with squadrons of UFOs and cryptid sightings and portals to the Numinous – not so much the geologically-inert cores of the cratons, but their edges where their granitic geology rubs up against neighbour plates, where the electromagnetic activity from the piezoelectricity or triboelectricity of rocks in crisis stimulates the temporal lobes of sensitive or susceptible surface-dwellers and nudges them into altered states of consciousness. Who knew that the Mountains of Madness were located in Eastern Canada all along? Persinger saw no urgent need to determine whether EQLs are an objective occurrence or a subjective one: hallucinations in wandering minds that might otherwise manifest as UFOs or BVMS (he scores admirably high on the ‘tolerance for ambiguity’ trait).
It makes no difference, of course; even earthquakes themselves are often illusory, though the illusion is good enough to fool the seismographs as well. But this ambiguity did not endear Persinger to Seismic Scryers like Freund and Pulinets, who did not welcome or cite his pioneering contributions, chiz.
CODA
The Machine-Learning black boxes are also central to the AETA earthquake-prediction contest (Acoustic Electromagnetic To AI), though in that application the digital oracles are far more respectable because entrants in the competitions only had seismology-sensor data to feed into them.
Earthquake Forecasting Using Big Data and Artificial Intelligence: A 30-Week Real-Time Case Study in China (Saad et al., 2023)
AETA is “an earthquake prediction research project based out of Peking University in China“. The founders / directors (Shanshan Yong and Xin’an Wang) provided would-be seismancers with archival data for training their AIs, then with real-time data as a basis for earthquake predictions. The lucky winners of the 2020, 2021 and 2022 competitions were rewarded with an opportunity to be coauthors on that year’s Yong / Wang paper about how great the AETA concept was working out and how governments should be pouring money into it.
“Time Series and Non-Time Series Models of Earthquake Prediction Based on AETA Data: 16-Week Real Case Study” (Wang et al., 2022)
“Weekly earthquake prediction in a region of China based on an intensive precursor network AETA” (Xie et al., 2022)
Judith Hubbard explained the clever part of this research program in a blogpost, and in separate PubPeer comments for each paper: If enough entrants sign up for the challenge, with none of them making predictions that are any better than chance, you can be confident of having promising results to proclaim because someone’s random performance will show a 70-80% success rate (someone else will deliver a 20-30% accuracy rate which would have worked as well if you bet the opposite).
I am indebted to Maarten van Kampen for appraising me of this flim-flam game.
Lost in a labyrinth, waiting for the ball of twine to show me the way out. BRB.
https://www.oglaf.com/skein/
Footnotes
Totally out-of-character behaviour, I know. ↩︎ I was convinced that ‘Brumation’ was one of the months of the French Revolutionary calendar, but apparently it’s what reptiles do instead of hibernating. ↩︎Dimensions.ai informs me that of the 85 papers listed for corresponding author Munawar Shah, 19 had Punyawi Jamjareegulgarn as coauthor. Some were published before “Possible seismo-ionospheric anomalies” (30 November 2022); others were published afterwards. “Seismo Ionospheric Anomalies around and over the Epicenters of Pakistan Earthquakes“, for instance, was received 1 March 2023 and published 21 days later. “Urban rainfall in the Capitals of Brazil: Variability, trend, and wavelet analysis” was published 1 April 2022. ↩︎
Many researchers with that degree of collaboration would decline the invitation to review. Many journals would never extend the invitation to review. But this is a Frontiers journal where a high level of intellectual endogamy is accepted.