Michael Freund, director of Amishav - an organisation that helps Jews move to Israel - says he firmly believes that Menashe is one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Extrapolating from Dr Freund's laboratory experiments, the strain in a real-life geological fault such as the San Andreas could, as it shifted, generate hundreds of thousands of amperes per cubic kilometre in a fluctuating pattern that would cause very low frequency radio waves to be emitted, thus disrupting the ionosphere.