Richard Sprague

My personal website

Does my heart rate predict earthquakes?

Created: 2019-07-12 ; Updated: 2020-08-27

Now here’s something odd…

At 2:51AM on July 12th, a 4.6 magnitude earthquake shook the Seattle and Puget Sound area. I was sleeping soundly and didn’t remember a thing. But later when I looked at the heart rate measurements taken by my Apple Watch, I found this:

My sleeping heart rate, which most of the night hovers around 60 beats per minute, suddenly began to rise starting about 15 minutes before the quake, peaking at the exact minute of the tremors. The beats continued to be erratic shortly after that, but within fifteen minutes were back to the normal resting rate.

Did my heart rate somehow anticipate the quake?

What about other nights when my heartrate shot up much higher than normal?

## [1] "2019-05-31" "2019-06-09" "2019-06-15" "2019-07-03" "2019-07-04"
## [6] "2019-07-05" "2019-07-12" "2019-07-30" "2019-07-31"

To be continued…