From ye olde blog, May 2006: an interesting report from the BBC:
Concentrations of the natural pigment chlorophyll in coastal waters have been shown to rise prior to earthquakes.
These chlorophyll increases are due to blooms of plankton, which use the pigment to convert solar energy to chemical energy via photosynthesis.
This is based on an article by Singh et al. [doi] in Advances in Space Research, part of a special issue devoted to the use of satellite remote sensing for studying and predicting natural hazards such as earthquakes. The authors claim that you can detect a rise in sea surface temperature just before large coastal earthquakes. The blooms observed in this study are, they say, result from an increased flow of heat energy from the ocean to the atmosphere, enhancing the upwelling of cold, nutrient rich water and fuelling a boom in the growth of photosynthetic algae.
This is all very interesting, but what is unclear in the paper is the reason so much heat energy is being released prior to the earthquake, which is itself releasing accumulated strain energy. And, looking at the paper, I’m not really sure the relationship is quite as clear-cut as is claimed.
