Friedemann Freund

Friedemann Freund doesn’t shrink from taking on the really big problems. His research has elucidated such important phenomena as the fact that rocks under stress behave like batteries that can produce currents deep within the crust of the Earth. These are not piddling electron flows, either – the currents could be as large as hundreds of thousands, even millions of amperes, sufficient to be recorded from the Earth surface, and perhaps even from orbit. Understanding and exploiting this phenomenon could lead to a dramatic breakthrough in earthquake prediction. Friedemann believes that charges emanating deep within the Earth's crust provide an explanation for the unusual behaviour of animals which has been reported to occur before large earthquakes. Mineral defects become activated when rocks are stressed, leading to the outflow of huges numbers of so-called “positive holes”. These electronic charge carriers and their follow-on reactions have been shown to cause detrimental effects in animals. They could be the reason for the anxiety and restlessness that cause animals to make unusual migrations away from areas of impending seismic activity.

September 2016