Jim Berkland

The book includes a chapter that notes "Many of Berkland's theories--based on tides, moons, disoriented pets, lost cats and dogs, and magnetic field changes--were factors in the great Indian Ocean quake-tsunami disaster on December 26, 2004.

Berkland claims that government officials told him not to make any more predictions, fearing mass panic, and he was suspended for two months from his Santa Clara County geology position in late October, 1989.

He cited as factors the highest tides in 18 years and the proximity of the Moon, suggesting that the quake will most likely strike on Saturday, March 19, 2011.

[12] He has also claimed to have predicted the 1980 M 7.2 Eureka earthquake just fourteen hours before it hit, but the tape-recording documenting this "had somehow been lost in the mail".

[14] Berkland has been predicting earthquakes since the 1970s, but his method has not been described in the scientific literature (he claims because of censorship and a conspiracy of prejudicial reviewers[16]), nor in any detail in any media.

Since 1979 he has also subscribed to a theory that "pets often react prior to earthquakes by running away", which he measures by monitoring the lost-and-found ads in several newspapers.

In 2006 Berkland's method was described[19] as the "Three Double G" system: 1) "the gravity gradient, or the forces exacted on the Earth by the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon."

The West Coast regions are: Then he then selects location and magnitude by considering a number of other factors, including: How Berkland evaluated his success rate prior to 1999 is unknown.

Although that deficiency was considered statistically insignificant, the overall conclusion was that "the seismic window theory fails as a reliable method of earthquake prediction.

One analysis that tried to evaluate his results in a consistent manner found no statistical significance, and concluded that "Berkland is not actually predicting earthquakes.