According to the China Earthquake Network, at 1:45 am on January 8, 2022, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake occurred in Menyuan County, Qinghai. Some time ago, at the end of December 2021, a black bird covered in the sky appeared in Xining.

According to China Earthquake Network , at 1:45 am on January 8, 2022, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake occurred in Menyuan County, Qinghai.

Some time ago, at the end of December 2021, a black bird covering the sky appeared over Xining.

The black bird hovering in the sky is a crow. As the saying goes, Magpie announces good news, and crows report their deaths. When the crow appeared, many people said: Is there something wrong? Or are there any ominous signs?

Then an earthquake occurred on January 8, 2022. I feel that there is a special connection between the crow and the earthquake.

In fact, there are a large number of crows living near Xining, Qinghai. These crows usually visit the city when they are the coldest in winter.

Because there is hot island effect over the city, a large amount of heat is generated to make the crow feel warm. Moreover, crows are also an omnivorous bird. In winter, it is difficult to find food elsewhere, and it is easier to find food in cities.

But crows over Xining usually appear at the coldest time in February each year. From an ecological perspective, the crow is an good bird because it is an omnivorous animal and can help cities digest a lot of garbage, rotten meat or food residues.

Of course, crows gathered over the city, just on the eve of the earthquake, and there were certain accidental factors, because the entire western part of China is an earthquake-prone area.

According to data from the National Earthquake Administration of China, from 2000 to January 8, 2022, including the just-occurred Menyuan County earthquake, a total of 779 earthquakes of magnitude 5 or above in China, most of which occurred in the west.

And on December 19, 2021, a magnitude 5.3 earthquake occurred in Mangya City, Qinghai Province.

▍Why are there many earthquakes in the west?

The area of ​​ in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is 2.5 million square kilometers, with an average altitude of more than 4 kilometers. Its formation comes from the extrusion of the Eurasian plate and the Indian Ocean plate.

Strong plate squeezing has caused the crust to ridge and form plateaus and mountains, and has also created a large number of broken fault zones. It is the staggered movement between these plate fault zones that caused earthquakes.

and this uplift is still continuing, so the earthquake in Northwest China will not stop, and there may be a major earthquake.

Of course, from the overall national geographical situation, without the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, there would be no Yellow River and Yangtze River , and there would be no Yumi Township in the south of the Yangtze River, and there would be no Chinese civilization.

China occupies 2/3 of the world's strong inland earthquake. Earthquakes have also brought great damage to my country's urban construction and economic construction. China is the country that needs accurate earthquake forecasting the most. Therefore, the connection between various natural phenomena and earthquakes is also a topic that people often talk about.

▍Scientific forecast of earthquake difficulty and related progress.

The rock slab fault that caused the earthquake was not only buried underground, but also has a very long range. It is difficult to clearly define the staggered boundary, so it is difficult to establish an accurate model.

However, there are attempts in this area internationally. , an earthquake expert at the Alamos National Laboratory in the United States, Paul Johnson, made the world's only earthquake physics model that can be repeated in the laboratory.

This physical model uses acrylic thick plates to replace plates that are staggered by earthquakes. By extruding acrylic slabs , it causes mutual misalignment and study what will happen before earthquakes.

This study has achieved a series of results, but it is still a long way to go before the real forecast of earthquakes, because the tectonic model of plastic plates in the laboratory is regular, and every earthquake occurs, it is different from any previous earthquake.

So at least so far, there is no seismic mathematical physics model in the strict sense.

▍Can animals predict earthquakes?

Two very famous earthquakes in Chinese history, Tangshan earthquake and Haicheng earthquake, animals had abnormal performance.

From a statistical perspective, many animals did have abnormal reactions before earthquakes.

But why animals have these abnormal reactions, there is no way to establish a clear connection with earthquake results. The difficulty here is as follows: What physical abnormality happened before the earthquake? What physical anomalies can animals detect?

Usually, it is believed that rock slabs must undergo strong extrusion before they move. This extrusion will cause abnormal charge distribution in a large range of lithospheres, and may even generate current, further causing local geomagnetic changes.

Some animals are more sensitive to geomagnetic abnormalities and may have abnormal behavior.

Because in the long-term historical evolution, the ancestors of these animals have such behaviors, and the survival probability of adapting to changes is high. Under this screening mechanism, a group of animals that are more sensitive to earthquake conditions will appear.

Many birds have abnormal reactions before earthquakes. Some domestic birds will continuously hit the cages and even kill themselves.

2008, before the Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan, a large number of frogs climbed onto the road, and many birds stopped foraging and flew around the sky. And there is a village where there are indeed a large number of crows.

So the crows flying over Xining a while ago may have some connection with earthquakes. However, these birds are all local resident birds. There is no clear conclusion yet.

▍Is crow sensitive to magnetic fields?

The answer is yes. According to the Magnetic Sensitivity of Cryptochrome 4 from Migratory Songbirds on June 23, 2021 (Nature (2021), DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03618-9), scientists have figured out the principle of birds' sensitivity to magnetic fields.

There is a protein called cryptochrome 4 in the body of birds, which is a chain composed of 527 amino acids.

Scientists have found that when free electron jumps between the amino acids of cryptochrome 4, it will produce a kind of free radical that is sensitive to magnetic fields.

According to scientists' preliminary estimates, this magnetic free radical uses a quantum mechanism, and can detect a magnetic field that is 1 million times weaker than the magnetic field detected by the instrument.

If it can be proved that plate squeezing before earthquakes can indeed cause large-scale geomagnetic abnormalities. This means that birds are likely to detect these magnetic field anomalies.

But birds are not scientific instruments, they have many instinctive behaviors and cannot speak.

Therefore, further research is needed to analyze which behaviors are caused by large-scale magnetic field anomalies from a series of abnormal behaviors in birds.

If you can use the bionic principle to replicate this magnetic sensitive free radical, you can also use instruments to check the magnetic field abnormalities that occur before earthquakes.

The earth's magnetic field strength is about 1/10,000 Tesla . To reach the level of birds, human instruments need to increase the accuracy to one-tenth of a billion Tesla.

Therefore, even though not every time the crow's abnormal behavior indicates an earthquake, it has pointed out the direction for human earthquake prediction.