Disaster Advances Vol. 6 (4) April 2013 (14) The effect of solar cycle’s activities on earthquake: a conceptual idea for forecasting Nikouravan Bijan, 1 Pirasteh Saied 2,4* and Mollaee Somayeh 3 1. Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Malaya, MALAYSIA 2. GeoSTARS Lab, Department of Geography and Environmental Management, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo, CANADA 3. Faculty of Environmental Studies, University Putra Malaysia, MALAYSIA 4. Research Institute Centre for Disaster Management, Esfahan, IRAN *moshaver1380@yahoo.co.uk Abstract It has been seen that the period of solar activity and its cycle has a decrease of seismic activity in the compression zone of the Earth. In addition, at the same time there is an increase of the activity in the tension zones of the Earth. This study has been emphasized on last 45 years (i.e. 1960-2005) cyclic data in term of the number of seismic and sunspots activities. The high correlation between sunspot and earthquakes shows that there is long-term forecast for the earthquakes mainly in Iran, Japan and USA in and after 2010. The next maximum of seismic activities and earthquakes with very high amplitude for the tension zones on the Earth has forecasted for the period 2012-2013 mainly in the night. This has been alarming for the countries that fall within the seismic region such as Iran, Japan, USA etc. and if the Governments do not make the infrastructure strengthen, there may be more disasters and loss of life and properties in future. Keywords: Astrophysics-Solar flares, Solar activity, Sunspots, Earthquakes. Introduction Natural disasters like cyclone, flood, drought, landslide, earthquake etc. have devastating effect on life and property. Earthquakes are short-lived, menacing and the most feared natural hazards because of their sudden impact and devastation in a matter of few seconds inflicting immense losses of life and property. The maximum economical casualties caused by natural disaster during 1900-2005 occurred in Asia and Pacific. During the last 55 year Asian Pacific has tolerated around 588 billion US Dollar. Around 33 people of economical casualties belong to earthquake (www.unescap.org). According to UN report in 2005, Iran is listed among 15 countries in the world that faced with natural disasters and some of the Iran neighboring countries in Asia such as Armenia, Turkey, Afghanistan, India, Russian Federation and Georgia faced with Natural Disaster. Among all aforementioned natural phenomena, the earthquake is becoming a major phenomenon to damage the life and properties of the people and if no proper management and strategy are applied, a disaster will occur. Every particle has relation with each other to create a phenomenon like earthquake. That is a spatial data relationship. This study tries to present a classification for earthquake’s effects as Earth’s Internal Effects (EIE) or Tectonic effects (i.e. folds, faults, volcanic eruption) and Earth’s External Effects (EEE) as Non-Tectonic (i.e. sun and/or moon gravitation) (Figure 1). Many scientists believe that the most naturally occurring earthquakes are related to the tectonic activities and volcanic eruption but, according to our assumption, EEE possibly is the cause for the occurrence of the earthquakes too. Figure 1: Classification of the earthquake’s effects According to the aforementioned classification, the EIE is playing a very important role, but it has to be enumerating external effect. The external effects are solar effects, electromagnetic and gravitational effects. In this idea, the external effects assume to affect the earthquakes and act as catalyzing from the outside of the Earth which is called EEE. This paper focuses on the affects of solar activities as EEE only. In the last four decades, many authors have suggested about the effects of solar activities in earthquakes but by no means had exclusive physical roles. Simpson 1 found that maximum quake frequency occurs at times of moderately high and fluctuating solar activity. Sytinskiy 2-7 carried out a series of searches on the influence of solar activity on the earth seismicity. Lursmanashvili 8-10 and Lursmanashvili et al 11 spoke about variations and position of the earth on its yearly orbit in correlation with the solar activity. Ip 12 wrote about Chinese records on the correlation of heliocentric planetary alignments and earthquake activities. Forecasts were made on the basis of the correlation between the instants of occurrence of strong earthquakes and the time of passage of geo-active solar regions across the central meridian of the sun 13 . In this study the attempt has been made to guess about connection of earthquakes with 45 year cyclicality of