Since at least Aristotle scholars have sought to discover the connections between earthquakes and planetary motions. Aristotle noted in Book 2 of his Meteorology that there seemed to be coincidental link between eclipses and earthquakes. His coincidental link was transformed into a causal link, which could in principle be used to predict earthquakes, at least in vague terms (see, for example, “Pamphlets on the Earthquake of 1580” for a fuller discussion).
The search for correlations between planetary positions and motions and earthquakes continued unabated. For example, in the late 19th century the British physician and astrologer Alfred J. Pearce (perhaps better known by his pseudonym, Zadkiel) published his Science of the Stars (1881). In it he spent a chapter citing many authorities and cataloging a number of earthquakes to argue that “the planetary positions at eclipses that are the causes (or the “signs”) of earthquakes.”
Such scholarship tended to be confined to the astrological literature, as did scholarship trying to establish the link between the planets and the weather. Now and then, however, it spilled into more “mainstream” or “official” literature. In the case of predicting the weather by reference to the planets, a U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “Weekly Newsletter” in 1914 declared that there was no connection between the planets and the weather, “because they [the planets] furnish so little heat upon which all weather changes ultimately depend, and this belief is fully supported by weather records.”
In the case of earthquakes, the U.S. Department of the Interior Geological Survey examined the connection between the planets and earthquakes in their official publication, the Earthquake Information Bulletin in 1971. Under the guise of evaluating the claim that there is a correlation/causal link between the positions of the planets and earthquakes, Roger N. Hunter dismissed there being any meaningful relationship between them.
While Hunter’s approach is interesting, more interesting is the fact that an official government publication would think it necessary to refute astrology. Who would have raised this as an issue that merited official rebuttal? How does it fit into Hunter’s other publications on predicting earthquakes? But really, the main question is: Why did the government commit the resources (time, money, labor, pages in their official bulletin) to attack astrology?