Tony Hood is the author of a book, 'Kalopin's Legacy, 1811: A comet and a Quake' which is an interesting theory connecting the devastating 1811 New Madrid earthquake in North America with the passage of a comet that loomed very large in the night sky, a comet that was visible for 260 days and at one point appeared to be one and a half times the size of the Sun. This means that it was a comet that came relatively close to the Earth – closer than the average cosmic intruder. See www.wix.com/koolkreations/kalopins-legacy/ for documents and links to the book and the story.
This is a particularly fascinating subject at the moment as last week a comet crashed into the Sun and a massive CME outburst erupted on the far side of the Sun – possibly a coincidence. Who knows? Has the idea of comets coming close to the earth and triggering earthquakes ever been researched before? We do know that in the past there were some really big earthquake swarms – as described by Claude Schaeffer in 1948, and more recently by Amos Nur. They occurred at times associated with the break-up and disintegration of a large comet in the theory of Clube and Napier. However, the mechanism is unexplained – why would the Earth passing through a heavy Taurid meteoric stream induce devastating and global earthquake storms on the surface? An alectro-magnetic explanation might suffice.