Santorini Quake Update – 25.2.25 – Yesterday’s Prediction
Yesterday I made a prediction for Santorini earthquake activity, a prediction which hypothesised the tides being an indicator of future earthquake activity. In this article we’ll take a look at the data to see what actually happened. (Tide times are taken from Thessaloniki which has one of the biggest tidal coefficients in the Aegean)
A Quick Word On Tides
Tides are not the primary driver of earthquakes. And tides may or may not have a correlation to earthquake activity. It depends on the circumstances in a specific area at the time and also the area itself. Some parts of the world show more of a correlation than others.
In this article, I’m am just exploring the possibility, that at this location and under these conditions, that there is a correlation between the tides.
And if you are wondering why I am even bothering to look for a link, I’ll share this paper which deals specifically with this area (Santorini) and the connection between quakes and the tide.
What did I say yesterday?
The next step up in the tide size will be tomorrow the 25th from around 1:00am onwards (23:00GMT). High-tide is at 3:40am (01:40GMT) and this will go to quite a low low-tide around 10:40am (08:40GMT). If the tides are having an effect, there may be some increases in activity around these times
What did we see?
Graph below shows data from the past 24 hours (from 11.24 GMT)
High Tide
At 23:00GMT full tide was around halfway through its building phase, point “12hrs” on the graph. Earthquake frequency had already started to increase about 6 hours previous to this point. In this case, high tide had no obvious correlation with frequency. However leading up to high tide there was an 4 Richter earthquake recorded which was out of the ordinary.
Low Tide
Low tide was around 08:40GMT, “3hrs” point on graph. Frequency of quakes had been dropping since high tide. But we did get a couple of 3 Richter quakes just after low tide.
And if we go back a bit further using the graph below, there was a change in earthquake frequency around the time of the previous low tide at 19:30GMT on the 24th.
Summary
For the past 12 hours, we have seen a couple of relatively big earthquakes after low tide, and we saw a large earthquake just before high tide. We also see frequency increase around the point of a low tide.
At the moment I think the times to look out for are around the points of high and low tide, say 2 hours either side. (Granted there are four tides in a day so that makes up 16 hours!)
Next 24 Hours
Using this hypothesis, what could the next 24 hours bring?
Chart below shows the tides for the next few days.
If earthquake activity is changing around the point of high and low tides, I’d say we may see something from now, 13:03GMT until 16:03GMT.
The next low tide at 20:17GMT is not especially low so maybe nothing around then. 02:19GMT on the 26th is a bigger tide than today, perhaps between 00:00GMT and 04:00GMT we will see some change in activity.
And at 08:47 GMT on the 26th the tide is relatively low so between 06:47 and 10:47GMT is perhaps a time to focus on.
Let’s see what happens over the coming days to see if this relationship gets tighter. Or not.
