[HN Gopher] Can Earthquakes Be Predicted? (2022)
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Can Earthquakes Be Predicted? (2022)
Author : teleforce
Score : 38 points
Date : 2024-01-28 03:44 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (heritageproject.caltech.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (heritageproject.caltech.edu)
| ken47 wrote:
| What if earthquakes could not only be predicted, but manually
| triggered? Imagine the warfare implications.
| max_ wrote:
| Yes, there is such a thing as an earthquake bomb
| blueprint wrote:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67860-3
| ynniv wrote:
| It's much easier to cause something than to predict when it
| will happen naturally. As Alan Kay famously said, "The best way
| to predict the future is to invent it."
| tronicdude wrote:
| Fracking does this on a small scale. I had an excellent geology
| professor, Donald Prothero, who argued manually triggering
| earthquakes could be a much better idea in high tension areas
| than waiting for them to happen organically, as we could
| prepare, and the triggered earthquakes wouldn't be as bad as
| waiting for them to happen. But the paperwork would be a
| nightmare(:
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Another issue is that an earthquake in one location can
| trigger an earthquake in another.
| dsr3 wrote:
| Earthquakes triggered by fracking is usually small and non-
| damaging (less than M5, mostly M4 or M3).
| code51 wrote:
| It's actually impossible to know for certain how much and
| what size of land you're destabilizing. Duration of
| expected destabilization is also varying I guess and at
| least 1 year.
|
| Oklahoma, 2012 seismic sequence in Emilia (Italy), Sichuan
| Basin are already examples that triggered protests and call
| for investigations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Nort
| hern_Italy_earthquake...
|
| https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2187718/chi
| n...
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1225942
|
| An example study for US that states the activity is
| exponantially linked to fracking sites:
| https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10233410
|
| > "Exponential relationship between the total number of
| earthquakes and the number of wells in the Texas during the
| study period 1998-2018 with correlation R2=0.726."
|
| In the tragic earthquakes of 2023 in Turkey, this
| relationship was again discussed in mainstream media: https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Turkey%E2%80%93Syria_eart...
|
| It's not fracking itself but actually wastewater injection
| has a bigger influence in triggering bigger earthquakes
| according to what I've read. Moreover, it's also known that
| dams have a significant impact:
|
| https://archive.internationalrivers.org/blogs/227/china-
| eart....
|
| > "The devastating earthquake in Sichuan, which took at
| least 69,000 lives in May 2008, may have been unleashed by
| the huge Zipingpu Dam. New scientific evidence suggests
| that the filling of the Zipingpu reservoir may have
| activated a dormant fault line near the dam site."
|
| Shallow faults are _definitely_ activated. Probability of
| deep faults activated through full destabilization of a
| region? Unknown for now.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Releasing the tension in small quakes every few months must
| be preferable to letting it pile up and release every few
| decades.
| stygiansonic wrote:
| Also who would cover the legal liability in case of damages?
| grecy wrote:
| The Core - Best b-grade disaster movie of recent times!
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| Tension rods, logical idea, never seen before.. and ugly like
| hell, or do you hide them? All I find quickly is about tension
| rods for curtains. How common are they? Pluses no need to drill
| and would work for freestanding, more over just securing with
| screws to wall?
| jamiek88 wrote:
| The system is chaotic so even in principle it's likely
| impossible.
| lxgr wrote:
| Then again, groups of animals seem to be able to predict
| earthquakes and volcanic eruptions hours ahead of time:
| https://www.icarus.mpg.de/11706/a-four-legged-early-warning-...
|
| There are also reports of pretty interesting/odd
| electromagnetic phenomena reaching up to the ionosphere, which
| might be what animals are ultimately sensing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light
|
| A lot of these videos might be transformers blowing out or
| swinging power lines touching, but given the ubiquity of
| surveillance cameras and dashcams, we're fortunately getting
| more and more data. If there's something there that can be used
| for prediction better than seconds ahead of the earthquake, the
| value would obviously be immense.
|
| It might of course be that animals are reacting to something
| else, like sulphuric gases being released from the ground,
| infrasound of early earthquake acitivty etc. - we just don't
| know enough about it yet, but the fact that there's correlation
| between animal behavior and seismic activity seems worth
| studying.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Volcanic eruptions are predictable
| dsr3 wrote:
| Earthquakes might not be able to be predicted accurately, but
| some recent research 'claims' there some physical signs that can
| comes before earthquake comes. E.g. : helium and radon gas.
| Research related to 2011 Tohoku earthquake also reported that
| there is some magnetic anomaly before the earthquake.
|
| People that noticed these anomaly, however, cannot correlates
| these anomaly to the necessary parameter that is really required
| for true earthquake prediction: Magnitude, Location, and Time.
| Without saying what is the magnitude and location, you cannot
| estimate the earthquake damage. Time limit is also important.
| grecy wrote:
| Hasn't it been known for a while that dogs and birds react before
| an earthquake?
|
| They must be sensing _something_ we can make an artificial sensor
| for.
| ducktective wrote:
| >known for a while dogs and birds react before an earthquake
|
| I think I've read somewhere that the ancient Greeks were
| speculating on this...
| deepsun wrote:
| No, that's a myth.
| lxgr wrote:
| Groups of some animals can predict seismic activity at a rate
| better than random chance:
| https://www.icarus.mpg.de/11706/a-four-legged-early-
| warning-...
| jcranmer wrote:
| Your link fails to establish that. The main problem with
| animal behavior surveys is that they tend to report good
| results when you start with a known earthquake, and then
| look backwards to find unusual animal behavior before the
| earthquake. If you instead try to define objective criteria
| on animal behavior and then use that as a signal to predict
| earthquakes, the quality of animal behavior as a predictor
| turns to crap. In a nutshell, unusual animal behavior
| precedes most earthquakes... and many more events that turn
| out not to be earthquakes!
| lxgr wrote:
| That's a fair point; a detector that reliably detects
| impeding once-in-a-century strong earthquakes as well as
| every wolf or bear wandering too close to some herd of
| goats is probably not that useful.
| objektif wrote:
| You speak of general animal behavior but Where are you
| basing this on? Is there a study you can link to related
| to the topic in discussion?
| bragr wrote:
| >dogs and birds react before an earthquake
|
| Earthquakes have what are called primary (P) and secondary (S)
| waves. The primary is a sharp high frequency wave and the
| secondary waves are a lower frequency rumble that you feel as
| the earthquake. The P wave propagates faster so if you're
| distant from the epicenter the P waves might arrive fractions
| of a minutes earlier. That's what you see in videos of dogs
| jumping up and running off or birds taking flight "right
| before" the earthquake.
| lxgr wrote:
| That explains detection seconds before the main tremors, but
| there's some evidence that some animals change their behavior
| hours before the actual earthquake, before there are any
| measurable tremors, so there might be other mechanisms at
| play.
| mvdwoord wrote:
| There was a recent article on predicting earthquakes with GPS
| signals..
|
| https://phys.org/news/2023-07-gps-earthquake-predictor.html
| OlympusMonds wrote:
| There is a response to this paper on the journal website:
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg2565#eletters...
| (the eLetters section), which claims the signal from GPS is
| just noise.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| There's a great set of research coming from Alexis Cartwright
| Taylor's lab showing that it's quite possible that large
| fractions of fracture mechanics information is not transmitted
| acoustically. For example grain boundary rotations and change the
| stress field without releasing acoustic energy as they are
| typically elastic. This would indicate that even the very idea of
| what seismology has been the last 60 years, acoustic detection of
| earthquakes, does not produce enough information for
| understanding the earthquake process and thus prediction would
| not be possible using only data from seismometers. Of course,
| Gutenberg Richter b value people will tell you that's not true.
| But they seem to be a dying breed.
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