Quote Originally Posted by wallis View Post
Of course, the "endtimes" is bullshit.
Of course it is...

Your comment, however, impressed me that you hadn't even bothered to read the article and just dismissed it with the title, which soured the whole effort of posting.
Wallis, I could say pretty much the same thing about you - and probably have. So have most of the other visitors here. No, I actually read the article. I pretty much read everything completely (sometimes twice) before I comment on it. If I am not sure about something, I'll read it again and again until I understand what it was saying.

I thought that the correlations between comets and earthquakes a hundred years apart or so were of interest.
As an astronomer - I can tell you there is little correlation between comets and earthquakes. The Moon has a better chance of causing quakes (and likely IS part of the reason) due simply to mass and proximity.

What fascinates me is that I believe that the planet is very fluid.
Indeed, because the Earth is "fluid" specifically with a molten core, we have plate tectonics. Actually, a good example on a very, very time scale is looking at molten metal being poured in forges. If you watch videos (or go in person, it's more impressive face to face with thousands-plus degree metals being poured) carefully, you will see that some of the surface material is hardening sometimes and floating on the surface of the molten metal. This is precisely what the Earth is doing. Our crust floats because it isn't as massive as the molten metals below. Kind of like ice floats on water.

Plate tectonics isn't an exact science - mostly because there are so many factors invovlved.

Going back to comets - the mass of a comet is insignificant in comparison to the Earth. Even a massive asteroid hurtling past the Earth in all likelihood isn't massive enough to cause a pebble to tumble down a mountain.

Earthquakes are connected to one another in a way that is not yet understood. And, scientists who once were rather adamant that earthquakes have no relationship with each other are slowly changing their opinions.
Actually, they have known for quite a few years they are connected and there are "Earthquake swarms". Computer models of past quakes shown in a faster time sequence on a computer screen, visually has shown that quakes occur in groups and they travel around the planet. In the simulations (they weren't simulations, but they were playbacks on a world map) showed large quakes "migrating" around the planet westward from the first quakes shown.

The time compression was pretty large (like years instead of days or hours) but quakes moved west from each set.

So, there is actually a lot more understanding of this than you're giving credit for.

Can they predict the next one? No probably not.

Do comets have anything to do with it? Absolutely NOT.