Pond dried up!

On May 5, the Chutian Metropolis Daily, newspaper based in Hubei Province, reported about a pond that suddenly "disappeared."

On the morning of April 26, water in a big pond in Enshi, a city about 400 km away from the provincial capital Wuhan, suddenly whirled downward, accompanied by a loud noise. Within four hours, about 80 thousand tons of water drained away.

The picture above shows the dried-up pond. A second photo shows a farmer holding a big fish that he caught from the drained pond.

Big fish

According to local document records, the phenomenon has occurred several times over the past decades. The pond drained in 1949, when the People's Republic of China was established, in 1976, the year when the Tangshan Earthquake caused over a quarter of a million deaths, the Cultural Revolution ended, and Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong both passed away, and again in 1989, the year of the Tian'anmen student demonstrations.

On May 10, the West China Metropolis Daily, a Sichuan-based newspaper, reported that masses of toads were migrating from their usual habitats in Mianyang, Sichuan Province. Lots of them were run over by passing vehicles as they attempted to cross the streets. The newspaper cited the director of the local Forestry Department, who said that the phenomena was entirely normal and in fact indicated that the local environment was improving.

Toads on the road

The toads shown in the photo here are from Jiangsu, where their appearance is not normal at all. They're reportedly looking for a more habitable environment because their former living quarters are short of oxygen.

To predict an earthquake is still extremely tricky for modern science, even more so when social consequences have to be considered. But after every disaster, in hindsight there seems to have been signs that passed unheeded.

Are they total coincidences, or warnings from nature?