Can Animals Predict Natural Disasters

The wounds have healed but the memories haven’t. Natural disasters occur on an almost daily basis throughout the world. Earthquakes, floods, landslides, tornadoes and other disasters claim millions of life each year and cause massive damage to property.
If there was somehow a way we could predict these, we could mitigate their effects by quite some extent. Evacuation of people could be done well before any such disasters occurred and the world would be a better place to live in.
Obviously the first place we would look for a solution would be technology. Technology has solved some of our biggest problems and continues to do so.

Can you help Technology?  

Scientists have begun to use something called fractals, which are basically mathematical formula of patterns that repeat over time. Using these fractals they are able to make probabilistic predictions of the time, scale and location of different disasters, but accuracy remains a problem. Another method that scientists are using is the use of satellites. NASA’s SMAP satellite, for example, provides scientists global measurements of soil moisture and its freeze/thaw state so that they can develop better flood and drought prediction models.
InSAR (Interferometric synthetic aperture radar) satellites are being used to help predict avalanches and landslides as they are able to measure the changes in land/soil with the accuracy of millimetres. Still, technology is nowhere near to providing the solution we need for accurate disaster prediction with time to prepare, though it is improving. Is there anywhere else we might look into? The answer might surprise you. 

Animals To The Rescue?

When the Tsunami of 2004 occurred in the Indian ocean, it was the first time I heard about animals react in advance. Apparently, animals moved to higher grounds much before the Tsunami hit the shores. I was too little then and thought nothing about it.
But in the recent years, I have heard of more accounts of animals reacting in advance in various ways, to an approaching disaster. For example, in my own experience, dogs used to bark wildly just before any aftershocks that occurred after the Nepal earthquake.
Researchers say that they have noticed time and again that sharks swim to deeper waters before a hurricane or whenever a storm is about to happen. Abnormal behaviour has been observed in birds, elephants and even worms just before a natural disaster strikes.
So, do animals have a sixth sense that lets them predict disasters? Most probably not. Most researchers say that animals are just better at sensing the different signals in environment like light, sound and smell than us human beings. For example, much of the abnormal behaviour is attributed to being able to sense infrasound and ultrasounds that might precede an event, like an earthquake for example.
 
 

Can We Use This To Our Benefit?

Though there is no concrete scientific evidence of this phenomenon, the frequently observed behaviour cannot be ruled out in my own opinion. In the future, we could use satellites to track mass migration of animals and we could use this as a signal for impending disasters, especially in disaster prone areas. In the end, I think there won’t be one single technique that will help us predict and prepare for natural disasters but a combination of several ones. Observing animal migrations and abnormal behaviour just might be one of them.