Earthquakes

Magnitude 5+ Earthquakes - Global

No magnitude 5+ quakes to report for a second day.

China using dogs to predict earthquakes

A Chinese city is using dogs to predict earthquakes, an official said, after state-run media reported that neighbours were complaining of nightly false alarms - in the form of barking.

China is regularly hit by seismic tremors. Around 200 people were left dead or missing by a quake in Sichuan province last month, and hundreds of thousands have been killed in major disasters in the past. The earthquake authority of Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province in the east, keeps dogs since they will "act abnormally when an earthquake is coming", sometimes up to 10 days in advance.

The bureau used the dogs at the request of the provincial government, and chickens and ducks could be effective as well. But neighbours are complaining on social media about the animals' nightly howling. "The compound of the Nanchang earthquake authority has I don't know how many dogs, every night at 11pm they start barking over and over." The dogs have now been sent to a lower-level earthquake bureau in the city but they denied they had been barking.