Word: gribbin
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...book called "The Jupiter Effect," published in 1974, authors John E. Gribbin and Stephen Plageman predicted that a rare grouping of planets in the solar system occuring today would cause high winds and earth-quakes...
...According to Gribbin, the geophysics editor of the British scientific journal Nature, and Plagemann, a researcher on a NASA study of the upper atmosphere, the quake will strike in 1982 because the solar system's nine planets will be more or less aligned that year on one side of the sun, a configuration that occurs only once every 179 years. Citing new and old findings from fields as varied as meteorology, solar physics, celestial mechanics and geophysics, they boldly predict a Velikovskian sequence of events...
...radio communications on earth, creating exceptionally bright northern (and southern) lights, and affecting global weather patterns. Prevailing west-to-east winds will moderate, decreasing their contribution to the earth's rotation and allowing it to slow ever so slightly. The abrupt slowdown would provide the necessary nudge, as Gribbin and Plagemann put it, to "agitate regions of geological instability into life." Many quakes will occur in susceptible regions round the globe, but the authors have no doubts about which will be hardest hit: "The Los Angeles region of the San Andreas Fault will be subjected to the most massive...
...Gribbin and Plagemann are right, says Anderson, more quakes should have occurred when the planets last aligned on one side of the sun in 1803. But historical records for such quake-prone regions as Chile, Japan and China show no such upswing in seismological activity that year. Equally to the point, says U.C.L.A. Astronomy Chairman George Abell, Jupiter and Saturn alone are such huge planets that they pack about twelve times the mass of all the other planets combined; yet in their more frequent lineups they show no special gravitational influence on solar activities or earthquakes...
...Gribbin-Plagemann book has any value, it will be in increasing public awareness of the very real danger of a major quake-whenever or wherever it comes-and perhaps adding impetus to the construction of safer structures in California and other quake-prone regions...