Turks greatly fear Greek frog plague of doom
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Pastor Dale Morgan
May 28, 2010, 6:45:43 PM5/28/10
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Perilous Times
Turks greatly fear Greek frog plague of doom
They may just be looking for food and greener pastures. But in Turkey, the sudden movement of hundreds of thousands of frogs that forced authorities in neighbouring Greece to close down a major highway is seen as a sign that a devastating earthquake may be nigh.
by Thomas Seibert — 28 May 2010
Earlier this week, a massive plaque of frogs, estimated by local authorities to be in the millions, flooded a road near the town of Langadas in northern Greece, about 200 miles west of the Greek-Turkish border. Authorities described “a carpet” of amphibians covering the asphalt.
Police closed down the highway east of the city of Thessaloniki completely for two hours on Wednesday after some cars slid off the road as drivers tried to avoid hitting the animals. A day later, traffic was still slowed down by the frog migration, which was expected to continue for several days.
Thessaloniki traffic police chief Giorgos Thanoglou said the frogs may have left a nearby lake in search of food, according to the AP. But in Turkey, news of the frogs immediately triggered concerns that the animals may know something humans don’t.
“Frogs on the highway – earthquake at the door”, said a headline in the Turkish Aksam newspaper.
The newspaper pointed to recent findings by British scientists saying that there may be a connection between strange behaviour of frogs and a subsequent major earthquake. Frogs had been seen before a devastating earthquake in China in 2008, and a similar phenomenon was recorded before an earthquake in Italy last year.
Writing in the April issue of the Journal of Zoology, Rachel Grant of the Open University in Milton Keynes said that toads at a site 46 miles from the Italian town of L’Aquila started showing “a dramatic change in behaviour” five days before a quake hit the L’Aquila region last year, “abandoning spawning and not resuming normal behaviour until some days after the event”. The earthquake in the early hours of April 6 last year, measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale, killed more than 300 people and devastated several medieval towns in the area.
“It is unclear what environmental stimuli the toads were responding to so far in advance of the [earthquake], but reduced toad activity coincides with pre-seismic perturbations in the ionosphere, detected by very low frequency radio sounding,” an abstract of the article in the Journal said.
Scientists say there is no way to predict earthquakes. But the public in Turkey, a country where tremors occur in some region almost every day and where around 20,000 people were killed by a massive quake in 1999, is very receptive to reports of alleged breakthroughs in earthquake prediction, especially if those observations are connected to unusual natural phenomena.
After the 1999 quake in northwestern Turkey, which struck in the middle of the night, reports said animals like wolves and dogs displayed an unusual and excited behaviour shortly before the catastrophe.
People also look into space to find hints of a coming quake. Because the 1999 quake occurred just six days after a solar eclipse, a new eclipse in Turkey in 2006 triggered fears that another quake was about to hit. People in a central Anatolian province left their homes and moved into tents as a precaution, but the earthquake failed to materialise.
Still, the Langadas toad migration led Turkish newspapers to remind their readers that a mass of toads suddenly appeared in a Chinese city days before it was devastated by an earthquake in 2008. There were also reports saying that animals in a zoo 600 miles east of the epicentre of the Chinese quake started behaving strangely before the event. Around 90,000 people died in the earthquake.
Greek authorities were quoted as saying that the toad movement near Langadas was a yearly event and that there was nothing to worry about. But that did not keep Turkish newspapers from drawing a connection between the hopping frogs and impending disaster. “The earthquake is coming,” the Takvim daily said, while the Vatan newspaper said the alleged connection between the toads and a new quake was a “fear-inspiring claim”.
Turkish experts say there is a wide discrepancy between an abundance of earthquake fears and alleged signs of doom on one hand and a lack of concrete action to prepare for a future quake on the other.
Almost the entire territory of Turkey is though to be earthquake-prone, but although scientists say that Turkey’s metropolis Istanbul, a city of at least twelve million people, will probably be hit by a major earthquake at some point in the coming decades, authorities and citizens alike are slow to take safety measures.
Tens of thousands of buildings in Istanbul, including schools and hospitals, are thought to be too weak to withstand a major tremor, and streets marked as emergency lanes to be kept open at all times for rescue teams to get through in case of an earthquakes are routinely clogged up by traffic and illegally parked cars. One estimate says around 70,000 people could die in an Istanbul quake.
Turks greatly fear Greek frog plague of doom
They may just be looking for food and greener pastures. But in Turkey, the sudden movement of hundreds of thousands of frogs that forced authorities in neighbouring Greece to close down a major highway is seen as a sign that a devastating earthquake may be nigh.
by Thomas Seibert — 28 May 2010
Earlier this week, a massive plaque of frogs, estimated by local authorities to be in the millions, flooded a road near the town of Langadas in northern Greece, about 200 miles west of the Greek-Turkish border. Authorities described “a carpet” of amphibians covering the asphalt.
Police closed down the highway east of the city of Thessaloniki completely for two hours on Wednesday after some cars slid off the road as drivers tried to avoid hitting the animals. A day later, traffic was still slowed down by the frog migration, which was expected to continue for several days.
Thessaloniki traffic police chief Giorgos Thanoglou said the frogs may have left a nearby lake in search of food, according to the AP. But in Turkey, news of the frogs immediately triggered concerns that the animals may know something humans don’t.
“Frogs on the highway – earthquake at the door”, said a headline in the Turkish Aksam newspaper.
The newspaper pointed to recent findings by British scientists saying that there may be a connection between strange behaviour of frogs and a subsequent major earthquake. Frogs had been seen before a devastating earthquake in China in 2008, and a similar phenomenon was recorded before an earthquake in Italy last year.
Writing in the April issue of the Journal of Zoology, Rachel Grant of the Open University in Milton Keynes said that toads at a site 46 miles from the Italian town of L’Aquila started showing “a dramatic change in behaviour” five days before a quake hit the L’Aquila region last year, “abandoning spawning and not resuming normal behaviour until some days after the event”. The earthquake in the early hours of April 6 last year, measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale, killed more than 300 people and devastated several medieval towns in the area.
“It is unclear what environmental stimuli the toads were responding to so far in advance of the [earthquake], but reduced toad activity coincides with pre-seismic perturbations in the ionosphere, detected by very low frequency radio sounding,” an abstract of the article in the Journal said.
Scientists say there is no way to predict earthquakes. But the public in Turkey, a country where tremors occur in some region almost every day and where around 20,000 people were killed by a massive quake in 1999, is very receptive to reports of alleged breakthroughs in earthquake prediction, especially if those observations are connected to unusual natural phenomena.
After the 1999 quake in northwestern Turkey, which struck in the middle of the night, reports said animals like wolves and dogs displayed an unusual and excited behaviour shortly before the catastrophe.
People also look into space to find hints of a coming quake. Because the 1999 quake occurred just six days after a solar eclipse, a new eclipse in Turkey in 2006 triggered fears that another quake was about to hit. People in a central Anatolian province left their homes and moved into tents as a precaution, but the earthquake failed to materialise.
Still, the Langadas toad migration led Turkish newspapers to remind their readers that a mass of toads suddenly appeared in a Chinese city days before it was devastated by an earthquake in 2008. There were also reports saying that animals in a zoo 600 miles east of the epicentre of the Chinese quake started behaving strangely before the event. Around 90,000 people died in the earthquake.
Greek authorities were quoted as saying that the toad movement near Langadas was a yearly event and that there was nothing to worry about. But that did not keep Turkish newspapers from drawing a connection between the hopping frogs and impending disaster. “The earthquake is coming,” the Takvim daily said, while the Vatan newspaper said the alleged connection between the toads and a new quake was a “fear-inspiring claim”.
Turkish experts say there is a wide discrepancy between an abundance of earthquake fears and alleged signs of doom on one hand and a lack of concrete action to prepare for a future quake on the other.
Almost the entire territory of Turkey is though to be earthquake-prone, but although scientists say that Turkey’s metropolis Istanbul, a city of at least twelve million people, will probably be hit by a major earthquake at some point in the coming decades, authorities and citizens alike are slow to take safety measures.
Tens of thousands of buildings in Istanbul, including schools and hospitals, are thought to be too weak to withstand a major tremor, and streets marked as emergency lanes to be kept open at all times for rescue teams to get through in case of an earthquakes are routinely clogged up by traffic and illegally parked cars. One estimate says around 70,000 people could die in an Istanbul quake.
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