Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 26, 1990 TAG: 9007260348
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JERRY CARROLL SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
DATELINE: ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. LENGTH: Long
He told audiences before last October's earthquake that the earth was going to move in the San Francisco Bay Area, and now he says there is a 50-50 chance there'll be a major earthquake Dec. 3 on the New Madrid Fault in Missouri, on the Hayward Fault east of San Francisco or in Tokyo.
He said hello and shook hands. At 72, he is beset by the infirmities of age and each step on swollen feet is painfully slow.
The interest people have in Iben Browning is understandable. He missed by just six hours hitting October's 7.1 earthquake on the nose in a forecast published in 1985 and by five minutes in an update a week before the disaster.
One geologist estimated the chances of this being a lucky guess at 100,000 to 1.
He also made the forecast in speeches Oct. 10 at the annual Blanchard Investment Conference in New Orleans and a few days later at a convention of farm and construction equipment manufacturers in San Francisco. Thousands heard him speak, including Maureen Reagan and her husband, Dennis Revile.
Browning made his projection - the term he prefers to prediction - about last October's earthquake offhandedly on his way to forecasting the possibility of a far worse one on the New Madrid Fault in Missouri next Dec. 3.
He bases his forecasts on astronomical calculations concerning the pressures the sun and moon exert on the Earth's surface - 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.
Scientists who have studied tidal influences of the sun and 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 correlation 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 kill hundreds of thousands 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 classes Dec. 3 and 4. The Missouri and Arkansas National Guards are planning earthquake exercises those dates.
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 correct in the October event is a verifiable fact."
Furthermore, Stewart continued, "He was also apparently correct within a few days of predicting the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980. In this latter instance he was speaking before a group of several hundred in Portland, Ore., on May 15, 1980, when he told them it would go `in about a week.' " The volcano, dormant for 123 years, had been threatening 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 earthquake and the Novado del Ruiz volcano eruption in Colombia, 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."
Still, Don Isenberg, a physicist who is chief scientist and boss of Microbics Corp. in Carlsbad, Calif., remembered a dinner party in Los Angeles on Feb. 8, 1971.
"Dr. Browning said, `I think this will be an interesting evening.' I said why and he said, `I think we'll have an earthquake in this area before morning.' " Early the next morning came the San Fernando earthquake that measured 6.4 on the Richter scale.
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 sure-you-can category as Jim Berkland, the Santa Clara County geologist who says he predicts earthquakes using a theory based in part on how many pets run away from home?
"If any person in this country can be called a national treasure . . . Dr. Browning is one," said William Dress, a Harvard-trained senior researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "I've known quite a few Nobel Prize winners, and I think Browning is at least in their class."
Browning and his daughter and collaborator, Evelyn, talked over breakfast, during a drive to look at the ruins of an Indian pueblo, and over lunch in Albuquerque's Old Town. It soon became clear that Browning has one of those capacious and far-reaching minds a century produces only at long intervals.
"He has an intellect like a giant," said Dwaine W. Rogge, president and founder of the Commerce Financial Group in Lincoln, Neb. "He must have an IQ of 200-plus," said agricultural futures 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 investment and business decisions based on Browning's analysis of climatic trends.
by CNB