The stubborn old belief that certain weather precedes earthquakes
The article examines the long‑standing belief that certain weather conditions, such as hot and still air, precede earthquakes and labels it as pseudoscience. It traces the idea back to Aristotle, who linked earthquakes to trapped underground winds, and explains that modern science attributes quakes to tectonic plate movements. The persistence of the myth is attributed to psychological factors like heightened irritability during oppressive weather, which makes a subsequent tremor more memorable.
- ▪Aristotle in the 4th century BC suggested that earthquakes were caused by winds trapped in underground caves, leading to hot, calm surface weather before a quake.
- ▪Modern geology shows that earthquakes result from sudden slip along tectonic plate boundaries deep beneath the Earth’s surface, not from atmospheric conditions.
- ▪The notion of “earthquake weather” has survived for centuries despite lacking scientific support, often appearing in folklore and popular media.
- ▪Researchers propose that oppressive, sultry weather may increase irritability, causing people to remember a quake that follows such conditions more vividly.
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| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/07/25/earthquake-weather.html |
| Publication time | Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:29:40 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T01:12:39.523Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T01:12:39.523Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | DtLjOt0X3T14 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The stubborn old belief that certain weather precedes earthquakes Ellsworth Toohey 5:29 pm Sat Jul 25, 2026 earthquake weather — Unknown authorUnknown author / Public domain (Wikimedia Commons) The idea that a particular kind of weather — hot, still, and heavy — arrives just before an earthquake is old and stubborn. One geologist has called earthquake weather one of the most common pseudoscientific ways people try to predict quakes. You can trace it back to Aristotle, who argued in the 4th century BC that earthquakes were caused by winds trapped in underground caves. If a great mass of air was building up below, the reasoning went, the surface air would turn hot and calm first. Variations followed for centuries, including the claim that strange clouds appear about a week before a quake.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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