The Jupiter Put-On

As they monitor the stresses inexorably building up in the earth along the San Andreas Fault, seismologists agree that California could at almost any time suffer another major earthquake, perhaps even more serious than San Francisco's 1906 disaster. Scientists hesitate to predict exactly when or where the big quake will come, but that has not deterred two young astronomers, John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann. In a new book, The Jupiter Effect (Walker; $7.95), which has generally been treated seriously by the press and the networks, they prophesy that a major quake will devastate the Los Angeles area in 1982. What has gone largely unnoticed, however, is that most seismologists and astronomers consider the quake prediction far-fetched and the theory behind it even more shaky.

Old and New. According to Gribbin, the geophysics editor of the British scientific journal Nature, and Plagemann, a researcher on a NASA study of the upper atmosphere, the quake will strike in 1982 because the solar system's nine planets will be more or less aligned that year on one side of the sun, a configuration that occurs only once every 179 years. Citing new and old findings from fields as varied as meteorology, solar physics, celestial mechanics and geophysics, they boldly predict a Velikovskian sequence of events.

As the planets line up, they say, the combined gravitational tug will raise large tides and cause great flare-ups on the sun, which will then be at the peak of its eleven-year sunspot cycle. The solar storms will spew out streams of charged particles more intense than usual, disrupting radio communications on earth, creating exceptionally bright northern (and southern) lights, and affecting global weather patterns. Prevailing west-to-east winds will moderate, decreasing their contribution to the earth's rotation and allowing it to slow ever so slightly. The abrupt slowdown would provide the necessary nudge, as Gribbin and Plagemann put it, to "agitate regions of geological instability into life." Many quakes will occur in susceptible regions round the globe, but the authors have no doubts about which will be hardest hit: "The Los Angeles region of the San Andreas Fault will be subjected to the most massive earthquake known in the populated regions of the earth in this century."

Most scientists are disturbed by the lack of solid evidence to support that dramatic prediction. Veteran Seismologist Charles Richter of Caltech, famed for his earthquake-intensity scale, calls the thesis "pure astrology in disguise. In fact, it is very close to pure fantasy." Says M.I.T. Geophysicist M. Nafi Toksoz: "I'm not going into a bunker or anything like that when all the planets line up." Even those who concede the possible validity of some of the effects --the connection, say, between solar flare-ups and global climate--were highly skeptical about The Jupiter Effect. Don Anderson, director of Caltech's seismological laboratory, describes the book's predicted sequence of events as little more than "one inference piled upon another." His Caltech colleague, James Whitcomb, calls it a blend of "some plausible things with a lot of unproven things. For example, there is a correlation between sunspots and atmospheric activity, and atmospheric activity with variations in the earth's rotation, but the relationship between these changes in the rotation rate and the occurrence of earthquakes all over the world is far more tenuous. Certainly, it is not proved which comes first, and the conclusion that California is going to have an earthquake in no way follows."

If Gribbin and Plagemann are right, says Anderson, more quakes should have occurred when the planets last aligned on one side of the sun in 1803. But historical records for such quake-prone regions as Chile, Japan and China show no such upswing in seismological activity that year. Equally to the point, says U.C.L.A. Astronomy Chairman George Abell, Jupiter and Saturn alone are such huge planets that they pack about twelve times the mass of all the other planets combined; yet in their more frequent lineups they show no special gravitational influence on solar activities or earthquakes.

If the Gribbin-Plagemann book has any value, it will be in increasing public awareness of the very real danger of a major quake--whenever or wherever it comes--and perhaps adding impetus to the construction of safer structures in California and other quake-prone regions.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.