Our friends at NASA tell us this;
Cracks in Earth's Magnetic Shield
Immense cracks in our planet's magnetic field can remain open for hours, allowing the solar wind to gush through and power stormy space weather.
Dec. 3, 2003: Earth is surrounded by a magnetic force field--a bubble in space called "the magnetosphere" tens of thousands of miles wide. Although many people don't know it exists, the magnetosphere is familiar. It's a far flung part of the same planetary magnetic field that deflects compass needles here on Earth's surface. And it's important. The magnetosphere acts as a shield that protects us from solar storms.
According to new observations, however, from NASA's IMAGE spacecraft and the joint NASA/European Space Agency Cluster satellites, immense cracks sometimes develop in Earth's magnetosphere and remain open for hours. This allows the solar wind to gush through and power stormy space weather.
This tells us that clouds of charged particles are intermittently leaking into our magnetosphere and moving. When these clouds of charged particles move across a tectonic fault or a magnetic anomaly in the geology a current discharge to the ground occurs causing magnetic geologic force and earthquakes following the right hand rule.
These charged particle clouds are referred to as "Plasmoids", but I prefer to call them "Plasma Bubbles" for parts of them detach making smaller plasmoids as they move eastward.
The plasma bubbles leak into the magnetosphere over the Indian Ocean where there is a magnetic pinch;
Since these plasma bubbles carry part of the sun's magnetic field with them they are repulsed eastwards to weaker areas of magnetic strength in the magnetosphere. Their movement is somewhat predictable.
A rough guide would be...
* ~2 days to Australia
* ~12 days to US west coast
* ~13 days to Oklahoma (Ames Structure [magnetic anomaly])
* ~15 days to the US east coast
* ~25 days to the mid Atlantic ridge
* ~30 days to the UK
* ~45 days to Asia (full ciruit)
So with this data once the plasma leaks into the magnetoshere there is a ~12 window before the large quake occurs in California.
The plasma bubbles tend to follow magnetic intensity field patterns like this;
