------Program code: NS-081203-02944 (what's this?)
Source: CCTV.com
12-03-2008 10:00
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In mid December 2004, something unexpected happened at the Wuxu Snake Farm in Nanning, Guangxi. Zhang Xinwen, the farm owner, found that the snakes, which should be quiet in hibernation, were abnormally active.
They not only crawled all over the house, some of them even got outdoors.
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Several days later, these snakes gathered together again and returned to their normal half-asleep-half-awake state. She wondered what had happened to these snakes. She was very upset about this and wanted to find out the reason.
Several months later, a stranger visited. He believed that it had something to do with the Indian Ocean Tsunami. On Dec. 26, 2004, a severe earthquake hit the area around the sea off the Indonesian Sumatra Island, triggering a tsunami affecting over a dozen countries along the Indian Ocean and causing more than 300,000 casualties while leaving tens of millions homeless.
Despite the fact that Nanning is 2,492 km away from the epicenter of this disastrous earthquake, just days before this natural disaster, Zhang Xinwen's snakes started to act abnormally. What is more incredible is that this stranger also put forward a strange request---he wanted these snakes to predict earthquakes. This stranger is Jiang Weisong, director of the Nanning Seismological Bureau.
Today, many kinds of instruments and equipment are available for monitoring underground activities. Why had Mr. Jiang turned to snakes to predict earthquakes?
Is it really possible to solve this problem with the help of snakes? Snakes have bad eyesight. Without external ears, their hearing is also poor. How can they predict earthquakes?
In April 2005, Jiang Weisong chose seven snake farms in six counties around Nanning City as observation points. He gave special training to the local snake-raisers.
But on the morning of October 22 that year, the snakes on Zhang Xinwen's farm suddenly started killing themselves!
Was a big earthquake going to occur? However, the earth seemed very silent.
Is it possible that the snakes had caught some unknown disease?
Was the strange behaviour of the snakes a sign of the impending earthquake? Or was it just a coincidence? Jiang Weisong decided to increase the monitoring of the snakes.
Surveillance cameras were installed. Through the network, the seismological bureau was able to capture the movements of the snakes 24 hours a day. This is the first time that snakes have been remotely monitored to forecast earthquakes. But this time they found that the snakes had once again become calm. In 2006, the snakes didn't show any abnormality. The people on duty at the seismological bureau kept their eyes on the monitoring screens everyday. On July 11, the snakes suddenly started behaving very strangely.
The direct distance between Pingguo County and Nanning City is 119 km, while that between Tian'e County and Nanning City is 240 km. The predictions made by the cobras 5 days before the earthquake were proven to be correct.
The accurate prediction of earthquakes requires a great deal of support in terms of finance, man power and technology. We hope that in the near future, we can precisely predict earthquakes for the benefit of mankind.
Editor:Yang
