A team led by academic Satoshi Ide, from the University of Tokyo (Japan) has reached this conclusion. As if it were a bad dream, the moon seems to be triggering the big earthquakes, which are more likely there are high or live tides, that is, when our satellite is in the full or new moon phase.
Our satellite was already known to exert an invisible but powerful force on Earth, activating the tides, keeping it more or less stable, and there are even those who think that it influences people's feelings, but until now, no study has been carried out that It was shown that it can also play a very important role in triggering earthquakes.
The team of researchers carried out a study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, in whichand they recreated the size and amplitude of the tidal force, that is, an effect of the force of gravity thanks to which the tides exist, which occurred weeks before major earthquakes, with magnitudes of 5,5 or higher.
So found a correlation between tidal forces and large earthquakes, but it was not detected by earthquakes of lesser magnitude. Still, it is still a surprising advance, which could be used to predict major earthquakes.
Earthquakes like the one in Maule (Chile) in 2010 or the one in Tohoku-oki (Japan) in 2011 occurred when there was a great amplitude of the high tide force. So that, there seems to be a relationship between one event and another which will allow researchers, perhaps in the near future, to better understand how earthquakes start and how they can be predicted to prevent more people from losing their lives in these tragic events.
You can read the study here (In English).
What did you think of this discovery? 🙂