North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes

(science.org)

73 points | by rbanffy 2 hours ago

11 comments

  • margalabargala 1 hour ago
    Could this be considered a good thing?

    The energy being released in these many tiny earthquakes was always going to exist in this location. Much better to release it slowly via thousands of tiny earthquakes than all at once. Better to have 10k magnitude 3 quakes than one magnitude 7.

    • sbuttgereit 43 minutes ago
      Geologic systems are more complex than this. Analyzing something like this as though it were a single system is wrought with the dangers of miscalculation.

      You could locally release stresses on an incremental, short term basis this way in a local system, while at the same time increasing stresses on nearby systems which could fail even more spectacularly, especially if the increasing stresses are being moved from a less dangerous system to a more dangerous system.

      I'm not suggesting the above is true in this case, but that you need to cast a pretty wide net with increasingly unknown (and perhaps unknowable) variables as you start to inject real changes into a local system and try to predict what those changes will actually do.

    • jjk166 21 minutes ago
      If you have an anvil hanging over your head, the potential energy that would kill you already exists. Slowly lowering the anvil makes sense. Damaging the rope holding the anvil doesn't.
      • ryanisnan 18 minutes ago
        I don’t think this is a good analogy.
        • jjk166 8 minutes ago
          If you have an ~~anvil hanging over your head~~ ton of compressed rock under you, the potential energy that would kill you already exists. Slowly lowering the ~~anvil~~ potential energy of the rock makes sense. Damaging the ~~rope holding the anvil~~ rock containing the energy doesn't.
      • moffkalast 10 minutes ago
        I think this is analogus to lowering it bit by bit in small but manageable head bonks.
        • jjk166 4 minutes ago
          The issue is the mechanism of "lowering" it. You're not giving it more slack.
    • booi 1 hour ago
      It's logarithmic so you'd need more like 30,000 magnitude 3 earthquakes to equal the energy of a magnitude 7. I don't think it's clear this is better. You can also make the argument that this may trigger the large earthquake that might not have happened for a long time.
      • MBCook 12 minutes ago
        So even if this does release pressure with no negative side effects anywhere it isn’t actually useful for preventing “the big one”.
    • andy_ppp 1 hour ago
      It can go either way, you might get a relief of pressure or you might get an increased destabilisation in the region.
      • skeptic_ai 1 hour ago
        There isA study about fire fighting. If you shit down every fire quickly then eventually you’ll have a major black swan. If you let fires burn a bit more then you’ll avoid black swan effect that burns down everything
        • dataflow 1 hour ago
          Have you considered logarithms?
        • ImJamal 57 minutes ago
          Are fires and earthquakes the same?
          • RugnirViking 14 minutes ago
            it would appear nobody here knows. We probably ought to shut up until a seismologist decides to chime in
    • brightball 13 minutes ago
      How does the energy for the nuke itself factor into the equation though?
    • bob1029 32 minutes ago
      We set off explosives to control avalanche risk.
    • micromacrofoot 43 minutes ago
      We are not even remotely close to being able to predict this in a way to apply it reliably. Plate tectonics and volcanology are incredibly difficult to forecast anything short-term in.
    • johnsmith1840 1 hour ago
      [flagged]
      • genxy 55 minutes ago
        Good opportunity to make a killing as all that new beachfront property opens up.
        • tacomagick 46 minutes ago
          Before Blackrock buys and sells them at 50000% markup
  • ortusdux 1 hour ago
    How long until someone attempts to diffuse a pent up fault line via nuclear geoengineering?
    • rtkwe 1 hour ago
      The issue on real faults is they span massive areas. The San Andreas fault system spans basically the entire coast of California.

      Even if we could identify the right points there's a big liability shift both legal and political between doing nothing and intentionally setting off an earthquake that would be hard to predict the size of. It's part of why ~~proscribed~~ prescribed burns fell out of favor, it's way easier to do nothing and blame nature than defending damage caused by intentional acts. It gets into messy areas where it's hard to convince people that the damage was lesser than it otherwise would have been in the future.

      • WarmWash 1 hour ago
        >It gets into messy areas where it's hard to convince people that the damage was lesser than it otherwise would have been in the future.

        Morbidly adjacent, the US is still getting dragged over the coals for using nukes on Japan rather than a ground invasion.

        • rtkwe 7 minutes ago
          The main reason is there are alternative paths where neither were required. Japan was already fishing around for diplomatic end to the war with the major sticking point being conditional vs unconditional surrender and their main condition iirc was protection for the Emperor which the US ended up not messing with significantly anyways. That's usually the main argument I see and honestly I see the points there, Japan really was putting out fairly significant feelers about a possible negotiated end to the war before the Soviet Union was able to pivot to the Far East theater.

          We'll never /really/ know what the outcome of a negotiated peace would have looked like since it was obviated so soon after it started by the bombing and Japan's unconditional surrender afterwards. We don't really know how much that path would differ from the outcome of the unconditional surrender turned out to be. The main point is it's not an either or situation between bomb and the bloody full on land invasion scenarios as presented by the bomb apologist [0] camp.

          [0] I mean this in the neutral dictionary sense of simply "one that defends a controversial position" just to clarify.

        • seunosewa 8 minutes ago
          There is no excuse for the second bomb.
        • polemicfire 7 minutes ago
          [dead]
      • gmac 42 minutes ago
        Typo: prescribed burns.

        One of the most ridiculous pairs of approximate homophones in the English language.

        Proscribed = forbidden. Prescribed = recommended/required.

        • rtkwe 7 minutes ago
          Whoops, thanks.
      • asdfman123 33 minutes ago
        So possible in less regulated countries but not in the US. Here I think it would be far too much of a legal liability.
      • christina97 1 hour ago
        If they can’t build high speed rail along the corridor then surely they cannot geo engineer it either!
    • onion2k 1 hour ago
      It's been theorized and allegedly attempted - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tectonic_weapon
    • slater 1 hour ago
    • metalman 1 hour ago
      Never, fer get it, in a word, insurance.
    • mc32 1 hour ago
      Sounds like a plot for a Superhero movie ;)
    • make3 51 minutes ago
      Imagine if they trigger the California Big One and all of LA, San Diego and the SF Bay (and innumerable towns) are swallowed "because of man-made actions", I wouldn't want to be the Governor or President to approve that one lol
  • ggg011012 43 minutes ago
    The long delay is the interesting part to me. How do they distinguish earthquakes triggered by the test from normal background seismicity?
    • Waterluvian 42 minutes ago
      Sounds like climate change induced disasters, and why it’s so easy to not take responsibility.
  • elictronic 1 hour ago
    This article does a very poor job of differentiating earthquakes people feel and care about versus magnitude 2 quakes that are like your neighbor dropping a book upstairs.
    • RobotToaster 1 hour ago
      Makes me think of the fact that the UK officially has over 300 earthquakes per year, but any you would actually feel are unheard of.
  • trumbitta2 1 hour ago
    Basically, they gave their land Atrial Fibrillation through strong extrasystoles.
  • SoftTalker 49 minutes ago
    It isn't geological destabilization. They've awakened Godzilla.
  • artur_makly 27 minutes ago
    If you keep tickling the lamp.. dont be surprised when the genie pops out.

    Or better put:

    Fuck with pachamama.. and she will have the last laugh

  • jdw64 1 hour ago
    So does that mean the Korean Peninsula is no longer a geologically safe region from earthquakes going forward? That's scary.
  • willmadden 16 minutes ago
    That headline is tabloid bullshit. They haven't established anything close to causation. This is margarine vs. butter tier media reporting. Do better, science.org.
  • shevy-java 34 minutes ago
    People are critical of North Korea - very understandable since the Juche ideology is absolute rubbish nonsense and North Korea remains hostile to South Korea. However had, with the USA becoming a rogue country now, I think it is time that many more countries will need a small, defensive nuclear arsenal: South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Canada, the whole EU (that is, all EU members need protection on their own; the USA can not be trusted anymore, Trump made that clear while serving Putin as agent Krasnov).

    One can say that more nukes are bad; that's true. However had, the big old countries CONSTANTLY abuse smaller countries. This happens again and again and again. So, since they don't stop their own nuclear abuse and blackmail, the only response that is logical is to more fairly distribute nukes. Of course a much better option would be for all countries to give up nukes; perhaps that will happen one day in the future though probably not, since when one refuses, others would have to follow suit and also get nukes. So the only viable long-term strategy is to have nukes, while also working much harder to improve diplomacy.

    • alansaber 1 minute ago
      Geopolitics is very complex, but at least those bigger states have a lot to lose. Under mass proliferation I can see a small country with an ideological nemisis deciding to just nuke them.
  • ranger_danger 1 hour ago
    Endless captcha loop for me, is there an archive? (archive.ph etc. has the same issue for me)
    • ENOMEM 1 hour ago
      • ranger_danger 55 minutes ago
        That is the same site as archive.ph with the same issue :/

        Also they are known for abusing javascript on client browsers to DDoS someone they didn't like.

        • jakzurr 26 minutes ago
          On Chrome, blocking javascript for each of these worked for me: [.]archive.fo [.]archive.is [.]archive.li [.]archive.md [.]archive.ph [.]archive.today [*.]archive.vn Also, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...?
        • Scramblejams 35 minutes ago
          Leaving aside for the moment the DDoS issue, that link is currently working for me. Archived pages on that site are puzzling, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, I'm not sure what accounts for the difference.