Talk:Supermoon

Evidence that earthquakes are no more likely to occur around the time of an earthquake than by chance

Wanting to get a clearer picture of the data, I decided to look at the dates of all large-scale earthquakes (8.0 magnitude and greater) and supermoons since 1900 to see whether earthquakes occur at at a greater frequency than we would expect by pure chance around the time of supermoons:

There are on average 5 supermoons a year. A criteria of +/- 3 days gives a 7 day window, meaning that there would be approximately 35 days in the year that the Earth is particularly susceptible to the forces of supermoons. This equates to 10% of the year. It follows that if earthquakes occur at random intervals, they would have a probability of occurring by chance within the supermoon effect window 10% of the time.

Between 1900 and today there have been 87 earthquakes with magnitudes of 8.0 or greater. If supermoons have a real, measurable effect, we should expect more than 10% of these earthquakes to have fallen within +/- 3 days of a supermoon. Since 1900, 6 earthquakes of this magnitude have fallen within this window, which is just under 7% of all such earthquakes, and less than would be expected by pure chance.

These findings, as well as a look at larger windows of within 1 and 2 weeks (for the goalpost movers) are presented in my blog post: http://skepticahome.blogspot.com/2011/03/can-supermoons-effect-earthquakes.html

I believe this is probably the most compelling evidence available that specifically supermoons (not just general lunar activity measured indirectly by tidal forces) do not have any measurable effect on major earthquakes, however because blog posts are generally not accepted as reliable recources on wikipedia, there seems to be no way to present it here short of explaining it in full. What does everyone think? Unnecessary? - Jessiessica (talk · contribs)

Unfortunately it's a deeper analysis than should be put directly in the article or made immediately obvious. If you were to try to convey that information, you would post the table in the article and allow the reader to see clearly the lack of correlation.

But the cruddy logic of the astrologers can be made apparent in much simpler ways -- for example, the article can point out that the increase in tidal force is the same at apogee regardless of whether or not the moon is full at the time (the position of the sun is important, but then the total force is max at a new moon).

I personally object to your method of analysis being inadequate to fully debunk the idea -- I would be more comfortable in personally crediting you if you got the sun and moon positions (or just total grav/tidal force calculation) at all earthquakes that were analyzed, then looked from there for correlations, including during apogee moons that were not supermoons.

In short, keep blogging, and your notes are welcome here.

Supermoon

File:Supmoon.jpeg

Supermoon

Supermoon seen on 27th September 2015 from north of Tehran's sky - Iran. MansourJE (talk) 11.37, 30 September 2015 (UTC)