Do Large (Magnitude ≥8) Global Earthquakes Occur on Preferred Days of the Calender Year of Lunar Cycle?
“No.”
This wasn’t the first time an earthquake-related research question was answered with a single word. Another paper from 1974 posed a similar question, basically, do earthquakes occur randomly in time, and answered it “yes.” In this case, the evidence suggests something similar: Earthquakes don’t occur on preferred days of the year, solar or lunar.
“That was the point of the exercise, in fact: to boil lunar/tidal triggering down to the questions that most people think about,” Hough told Gizmodo in an email. “Once it was clear there is no evidence for a significant correlation, the abstract wrote itself =)”