Tonight Ken Ring was on Campbell Live talking about the “link” between the moon phases and earthquakes. Now a lot can be said for Ken Ring’s scientific (or lack thereof), and there is a good post on stuff.co.nz about how “the theory” is not at all scientifically based. But this is not the point of this post. Instead I have done some very quick and dirty statistical analysis of the phase of the moon and the number of earthquakes in Christchurch, Darfield and Lyttelton of the six month period from September 2010 to February 2011.

What I have tabled and plotted below is the date of the moon phases against the number of earthquakes that day. I got the earthquake data from the Geonet archives and the phases of the moon from the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand. The counts are for only the single day of the moon phase, however, if someone has time they could plot them for instance a day either side as well. However, this simple analysis shows one thing. There is no clear correlation between the extreme phase of the moon and the number of earthquakes.

Now the only interesting spin on the data I can get out of quick analysis is the table below. What I have done is totalled the number of earthquakes for each phase. I have then removed the September data from three of the phases, and the February data from the Last Quarter phase to stop it being polluted by many aftershocks after a big event.

So what does this show? Well nothing much. If you remove the immediate aftershock data it shows that there are more aftershocks on a New or Full Moon. However, this is an average of one extra per day per month. It is not for one second statistically significant.

If someone wants to do deeper statistical analysis go ahead. This took me about 30 minutes to construct when I got bored.