M A S T E R P A G E
America walked through the door with hi
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F E M A
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E I S M I C
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L E U T H S
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daughter, looking with his bald head and spec-
tacles like everybody’s idea of a nice grandpa.
Given what we were going to talk about, I half
expected to see Iben Browning in long robes
and a tall wizard’s list.
He told audiences before last October’s
earthquake that the earth was going to move
in the Bay Area, and now he says there is a
50-50 chance there’ll be a major earthquake
December 3 on the New Madrid Fault in
Missouri, on the Haywood Fault in East Bay,
or in Tokyo.
Browning bases his forecasts—which he
calls mathematical calculations about the pres-
sures the Sun and Moon exert on the Earth’s
surface—on forces he says have a profound if
little known effect on the course of civilization.
While his projections fascinate the media,
they leave the science community with a
healthy dose of skepticism.
“No evidence,” say some.
Scientists who have studied tidal influences
of the Sun and the Moon have come up with
no evidence that they trigger earthquakes, said
James Dorman, associate director of the Center
for Earthquake Research and Information at
Memphis State University. In 1972, Dorman
studied 30,000 earthquakes looking for a cor-
relation, but failed to find one. “Browning has
not convinced anyone he knows what he’s
doing,” he said.
But Browning has his believers.
The New Madrid Fault was responsible in
1812 for the mightiest earthquake in American
history. Estimated at more than 8.5 on the
Richter Scale, it toppled chimneys in
Cincinnati, made church bells ring in Boston,
and awakened James Madison in the White
House and Thomas Jefferson in Monticello. A
similar quake today could claim hundreds of
thousands of lives and cause more than $50
billion in damages.
The South Mississippi County School
District No. 57 in Arkansas, for one, thought
enough of Browning’s warning to cancel class-
es December 3 and 4. The Missouri and
Arkansas National Guards are planning earth-
quake exercises those days.
In a memorandum last month to midwestern
earthquake experts and the Missouri Emergency
Management Agency, David Stewart of the
Center
for
Earthquake
Studies
at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape
Girardeau, MO, wrote: “That he was cor-
rect in the Loma Prieta event is a verifiable
fact.”
Furthermore, Stewart continued, “He was
also apparently correct within a few days of
May 18, 1980. In this latter instance he was
speaking before a group of several hundred in
Portland, OR, on May 15, 1980 when he told
them it would go in about a week.” The vol-
cano, dormant for 123 years, had been threat-
ening to blow since March 27.
Stewart said: “His calculations had also
picked the dates of Sept. 19, 1985, and Nov.
13, 1985, upon which the Mexico City earth-
quake and the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erup-
tion in Columbia, respectively, occurred.”
The memo, which was leaked, got Stewart
in hot water. “He swallowed Browning’s story
hook, line, and sinker,” Dorman said. “Stewart
did not boost his own stock in the scientific
community.”
A Visionary?
So who is this man and how can he appear to do
with a sharp pencil what seismologists
can’t, for all their high-tech laser beams, strain
gauges, and tilt and creep meters? Is he a seer,
a visionary who screws his eyes shut and holds
a finger to his temple?
Do we lump him in the same category as
Jim Berkland, the Santa Clara County geolo-
gist who says he predicts earthquakes using
a theory based in part on how many pets run
away from home?
“He has an intellect like a giant,” said
Dwaine W. Rogge, president and founder of the
Commerce Financial Group in Lincoln, NE.
“He must have an IQ of 200-plus,” said agri-
cultural specialist Roger Spencer, a first vice-
president of Paine-Webber of Chicago.
The two of them, like the majority of
Browning’s clients and the subscribers to his
monthly newsletter, rely on him for help in
investments and business decisions based on
Browning’s analysis of climatic trends. Before
diabetes limited his mobility, Browning shared
top billing at business and economic confer-
ences with the likes of Milton Friedman and
Henry Kissinger. He spoke 40 to 50 times a
year, getting $2,500 for his talks. “Earthquake
projections,” Browning told me, “are purely a
sideline, one that has really become a nui-
sance.”
He said that he made only seven projec-
tions about earthquakes or volcanoes erupting
and has been right each time. It doesn’t both-
er him that his fellow scientists ignore him.
Given his lack of formal credentials in the field,
it’s to be expected, he said. “Anyway, I’m not
talking to them. I’m talking to my clients.”
Scientist, Master Consultant
Browning is primarily an inventor. He has 67
patents, the most recent for a high-definition
television system licensed to the Japanese. He
has been a consultant for business in the
While fellow pilots drank beer after work,
Browning, who has total recall, stuffed his
mind with the Encyclopedia Brittanica. “I read
articles at random, integrating them into what
I already knew.” By war’s end, he had read
more than a thousand.
After the war, he got a master’s degree from
the University of Texas in physics and bacte-
riology and a doctorate there in genetics and
bacteriology.
Military Consultant
When he wasn’t inventing, Browning worked
as a consultant for defense industries. But
while studying the effects of atomic bombs for
the Sandia National Laboratories in 1957, he
realized they were puny compared to the
power unleashed by volcanic eruptions.
That’s when he began his study of climate,
immersing himself in several scientific disci-
plines in a manner not often done in an age
of narrow specialization. The data he consult-
ed ranged from magnetic field intensities dur-
ing ancient Egyptian dynasties to records of
lynx pelts bought from trappers by Hudson Bay
Co. in the 17th century.
He became convinced that earthquakes
and volcanic eruptions were triggered by
sunspot activity and the pull of the Sun and
Moon on the Earth’s brittle crust—the tidal
effect.
Seismologist William Ellsworth of the U.S.
Geological Survey in Menlo Park, a major
leader in quake research, says, “If there is a
tidal effect, it clearly is not something either
universal or of any practical importance.”
At least two other scientists agree.
Brian Mitchell of the Department of Earth
and Atmospheric Sciences at St. Louis
University and Arch Johnson of the Center for
Earthquake Research in Memphis wrote dis-
aster officials in the New Madrid Fault area
pointing out that of five earthquakes Browning
said were triggered by tidal forces, only one
occurred during a high-tide period.
“I don't think the prediction is anything we
should pay attention to,” Mitchell said.
Not Over Yet
Browning says that even if December 3 (when
tidal forces hit a 27-year high) arrives and it
turns out that seismic pressures here, in
Missouri, and Japan haven’t yet built to the
point where earthquakes are triggered, that
doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods. January
19, 1992, will bring on the highest highs in
more that 1,600 years.
You’re a pessimist, I said. “No I’m not,”
Browning replied with equanimity. “Man will
survive. He always has.”
