Reader Note: EQ Tireds

OK – this is where life gets interesting, if you’re data-centric and systems-aligned enough to admit the data sometimes gets weird.

I just woke up from a powerful wave of what felt like “the EQ Tireds” passing by.

Which is what, exactly?

Something – when you live long enough – you sometimes catch in advance of major earthquakes. Not many people get them, although a fair number of readers of these (odd) columns do. They are an overwhelming desire to suddenly sleep.

Not sleepy. Not “I could use a nap.” More like somebody quietly reached over and turned down the gain on consciousness itself for a while.

Over the years, I have noticed these odd waves sometimes show up ahead of major geophysical changes. Earthquakes, occasionally volcanic episodes, strange atmospheric turns. And every time I mention it, a subset of readers nod along like they’ve run into the same thing somewhere in life but never quite had a name for it.

There’s often other odd social static around such times, too. Reports of missing pets seem to rise. Behavior shifts a little. Not enough for headlines. Just enough to notice if you spend enough years watching patterns and enough nights listening to shortwave static roll across the planet.

And here’s the really curious part: there is usually a hole in the comments online. People don’t argue differently so much as they simply engage less. Energy drops a notch. The emotional “edge current” seems to weaken for a while.

Now before anyone runs screaming toward the woo-woo exits, let me offer the rational side of the ledger.

In my own case, this could be nothing more than biology. I’ve been running fairly hard keto for a while and have only recently begun phasing carbohydrates back into the diet. So maybe this is simply glycogen loading as the body renormalizes and starts holding more water again. Human chemistry is complicated enough without dragging tectonic plates into it.

But maybe it is something deeper.

The odd thing about the “EQ Tireds” — at least as I have noticed them — is that they have sometimes seemed to arrive one to three days ahead of major quakes in the past. Not always. Not clean enough for a spreadsheet. Not something I’d bet the ranch on. But often enough to earn a note in the margin.

Maybe some antique part of an already halfway-antique person still remembers an earlier strand of DNA. Back when the world didn’t send push alerts, sirens, or breaking news banners. Back when the warning system was hair, gut, sleep, animals, weather, pressure, smell, and the thousand little background channels modern life has mostly trained us to ignore.

Maybe the signal is as simple as this:

Something is shifting. You may want to be well rested for it.

Or maybe I just needed a nap. But do you?

Write when you get rich,

George@ure.net

Data Appendix: What the Literature Says About “EQ Tireds,” Animal Behavior, and Pre-Seismic Signals

This appendix is not offered as “earthquake prediction.” That bar is much higher. The proper scientific standard would require repeatable, prospective, time-stamped observations that beat chance and define location, time window, magnitude threshold, and false-alarm rate. By that standard, the official position remains skeptical: USGS says there is no scientific explanation for symptoms some people claim before earthquakes, and that more often than not no earthquake follows the symptoms. USGS also says that, despite decades of work, there is no convincing evidence that electromagnetic signals can be used as reliable earthquake precursors.

But that does not mean the subject is empty. It means it lives in the uncomfortable zone between anecdote, biology, geophysics, and signal-detection math.

The broad literature falls into four buckets.

First, there is the long historical record of unusual animal behavior before earthquakes. USGS notes that anecdotes go back at least to Greece in 373 BC, when rats, weasels, snakes, and centipedes were reported to have left their homes days before a destructive earthquake. USGS is careful, though: the evidence is abundant but anecdotal, and observed behavior ranges from weeks to seconds before events.

Second, there are formal reviews of animal behavior. A classic 1981 review by Buskirk and colleagues concluded that some animals may be more capable than humans of perceiving certain geophysical stimuli that could precede earthquakes. A 2013 review by Hayakawa and colleagues cataloged reports of abnormal behavior in land animals, birds, fish, and other species, and discussed possible electromagnetic mechanisms.

Third, there are modern sensor-based animal studies. Work using tagged farm animals has reported unusual movement patterns before some earthquakes, with the Max Planck summary noting animals became unusually restless in the hours before quakes and that behavior changed earlier when animals were closer to the future epicenter. A 2020 paper by Panagopoulos and colleagues argued for a biophysical mechanism involving pre-seismic electromagnetic changes, reporting animal activity declines over weeks before a quake in one dataset and corresponding VLF disturbances. These are intriguing, but they remain debated rather than settled science.

Fourth, there is the physical precursor literature: radon, ionospheric anomalies, magnetic anomalies, seismic electric signals, and other effects. A 2024 review in Geosciences summarizes decades of earthquake precursor research and groups much of it into electromagnetic and radon precursor categories. A 2021 Frontiers review emphasizes the core problem: the Earth is noisy. Candidate precursors must be separated from natural non-seismic variation and artificial background signals.

Where does “EQ Tireds” fit? Barely, and carefully.

Human pre-earthquake symptoms are much less studied than animal behavior. There are scattered historical and observational reports. The Alaska Science Forum summarized older accounts of health disorders before earthquakes, including an 1887 Genoa-area earthquake account by Taramelli and Mercalli and an 1822 Chile account describing altered perception before a quake. There is also a 1988 paper by L. L. Morton reporting increased headache incidence within 48 hours before earthquakes in two surveys, with one survey rising from 17% to 58% and another from 20.4% to 44%. Morton proposed positive air ions from rock compression as one possible mechanism, but this is not mainstream proof of human earthquake sensitivity.

The “missing pets” angle has also been investigated historically. A 1988 California Geology paper discussed the idea that dogs and cats might detect magnetic disturbances before earthquakes, while warning that lost-pet reports are messy because each report may cover a multi-day to multi-week window. In other words, the database is tempting, but the timestamp quality is poor.

Mechanistically, there are several plausible-but-unproven channels. Stressed rock can generate electrical effects. Radon emissions can change before some seismic events. Ionospheric and magnetic anomalies have been reported in some studies. Animals may detect low-frequency vibration, gas changes, electromagnetic changes, pressure shifts, or chemical cues better than humans. But the leap from “some physical anomalies may occur” to “a person suddenly becomes tired one to three days before a major quake” is a large leap.

A reasonable middle-ground interpretation is this:

If “EQ Tireds” are real, they may not be a direct earthquake detector. They may be a human biological response to some environmental variable that sometimes accompanies tectonic stress — electromagnetic variation, atmospheric ionization, pressure shifts, infrasound, air chemistry, sleep-cycle disruption, or even collective-behavior feedback. But if the same sensation can also be produced by keto adaptation, carbohydrate reintroduction, glycogen loading, hydration changes, alcohol, circadian shifts, blood pressure variation, or plain fatigue, then the false-positive problem is enormous.

That is the scientific catch.

Anecdotes become useful only when they are logged before the outcome. The clean way to test “EQ Tireds” would be a prospective log:

Date and time of onset.
Duration.
Severity from 1–10.
Sleep quality the night before.
Diet changes, especially carbs, alcohol, sodium, hydration.
Blood pressure and pulse.
Weather/barometric pressure.
Geomagnetic Kp index.
Location.
Then compare against global and regional earthquakes over the next 1–3 days, using pre-set thresholds such as M6.0+, M6.5+, or M7.0+.

The key is pre-registration. After-the-fact pattern matching is cheap. Time-stamped prediction logs are expensive, because they preserve the misses.

So the most defensible reader-facing conclusion is:

The literature does not validate “EQ Tireds” as a reliable earthquake predictor. Official agencies remain skeptical, especially for human symptoms and electromagnetic prediction. But the literature does contain enough animal-behavior reports, historical human-symptom accounts, and physical precursor studies to justify curiosity rather than ridicule. The right response is not belief. It is disciplined note-taking.

Or in ranch-speak: don’t bet the farm on it, but don’t throw the note away for a week, or so.