Whenever something really terrible happens in the world — and, obviously right now, it’s the Kahramanmaraş earthquake that killed tens of thousands in Turkiye and Syria on February 6 — charlatans come out of the woodwork from all corners and claim to have had foreknowledge of it, and try to spin it to their personal advantage.
That happened this week, when Dutch crackpot Frank Hoogerbeets claimed to have predicted the earthquake based on planetary alignment. Not in the astrological sense, mind you, but the gravitational sense. He is among those who believe that gravitational kneading of planetary bodies is what cause earthquakes, and that by looking at what planetary alignments are coming up, one can predict earthquakes.
It might even be a clever idea… except that millennia of earthquake and orbital data prove beyond any doubt that it’s false. There has never been any such correlation. It’s also implausible to the point that no further study is needed. Geologists, seismologists, geophysicists, a whole range of ologists — all understand the causes of earthquakes very well. We know what kinds of stresses most faults are under, and where those stresses come from. And the sum of all that knowledge is that we know enough to know that we cannot predict earthquakes. Nope. Nada. Never.
But wait! Doesn’t this tweet from Hoogerbeets two days before the earthquake prove that he did correctly predict it?
Even the epicenter he drew on the map is damn close to Kahramanmaraş. It seems a convincing case!
Here’s a paper discussing what a super high risk seismic zone that part of the world is. Do take a quick look. Whenever Hoogerbeets and other pseudoseismologists predict earthquakes, they nearly always pick places like these where powerful earthquakes are both common and inevitable. And if you go back to his “prediction” tweet, all he said was “sooner or later”. He didn’t say “in two days” or even “this year”. He said “sooner or later.” Sooner or later, it’s going to rain in the Amazon. Sooner or later, it will be wet at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Sooner or later, it will be hot in the Sahara. It was not a prediction.
This isn’t even a case of “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” This was “Sooner or later, a broken clock might be right.”
He did not make a prediction. He pointed out a part of the world well known to be seismically active. No shit, Sherlock.
The reason you don’t hear actual seismologists tweeting like that is they know better than to cause false panic, or to cry “Wolf.”
Earthquakes cannot be predicted.