Do tell us if you ever meet the right politician …
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Sure thing, but I expect I’ll find the right cat long before I find the right politician.
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It’s ok - I wasn’t holding my breath. 
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My sympathies.
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Last biggish earthquake we had, our cat at that time completely ignored until the ground actually started moving. We get a lot of small quakes, and if our cats reacted to each one, they’d be constantly in a state of spaz. Oh wait, that’s our cats anyhow.
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oh ho, i see you’ve been there! lol
it’s ok to visit – but i don’t recommend living there.
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There’s something that causes a sound at the very beginning that all the cats react to. So there was definitely an initial jolt they responded to that didn’t cause a lot of shaking. (Or, as others have mentioned, the initial P-wave vs. the later S-wave thing. Interesting if the P-wave would cause only one initial, detectable sound in the recording, though.)
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26 years of my life in St. Louis… which isn’t all bad but I have done my time in that state.
What is this place of too many cats? A veterinarian who can’t bother to close his cages? The home of a Crazy Cat Lady, who got her furniture from a dentist going out of business?
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It’s an earthquake detector. Software monitors the camera for excessive cat motion and automatically sends a text alert to the entire region.
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i lived in St. Lou for about 15 years, and it’s actually a great city – i’m referring to southern MO, really. not a pleasant place to live. and i don’t miss the humidity in MO at all.
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Yeah passing though was enough for me. Other than maybe… maybe visiting Lambert’s Cafe again I have no desire to pass through again.
In earthquakes, 3 types of waves are measured: P-waves, s-waves, and surface waves. I think everyone here is confusing s-waves with surface waves, which are very different. Almost all of the damage from an earthquake is caused by surface waves (along with some damage from s-waves). Surface waves can cause tremendous amounts of damage, regardless of infrastructure size, simply because the amplitude of surface waves is so much greater than either p-waves or s-waves. For instance in a magnitude 8 earthquake, the ground motion of p-waves will be about the thickness of a piece of paper. The the surface wave from that same earthquake will move the surface of the earth up and down by about 10 feet.
P-waves are compressional waves, just like sound, so I imagine those cats are hearing the p-wave arrival. You could even determine how far away the epicenter of the earthquake was by the time between the cats first reaction and the arrival of shaking. With a 9 second difference between reaction and shaking as in the video, the earthquake epicenter was about 70 km away. You would need 2 more cat cafes to determine the exact location, though.
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yeah, Lambert’s is one of those “you gotta go just once” kind of places for sure. the bar at the Port Cape Girardeau was an old haunt of mine when i was in school. lot of history in that place.
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Cats have correctly predicted 98 of the last 3 earthquakes. (that is to say, another hypothesis for this behavior is that cats lose their shit for no reason all the time, but only after an earthquake do humans correlate that to earthquakes)
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Triangulation by cat?
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Dogs know, too, of course. This doggo knew it was time to run around well before everyone else knew it was time to run around (eventually they all run outside)
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I want to know more about the animals that head for high ground before a tsunami. Do they always do that post-earthquake?
Just tell me that all of the poor kitties are okay.
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