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.
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.
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.
Energy is logarithmic with magnitude, but if the underlying model is analogous to springs being loaded and suddenly released, that model is quadratic in energy with distance.
The article cites 1399 detectable follow-on earthquakes. If each of them represented a movement of earth an equal distance as compared to a 30K times energy single event, each of those movements would be 1/173th in scale and therefore ~2x10^-7 in energy per event.
I think that's clearly better.
In order to take the same ratio of distance that would represent a factor of 30K, but to spread it across the article's 1399,
At least naturally, faults release almost all their energy in the few largest events. You never see enough small earthquakes that you would "release slowly" that amount of energy. It would really need to be several orders of magnitude of more energy being released slowly.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, I mean, I understand the words you wrote. I don't think it's a good analogy.
It is entirely feasible that the same amount of potential energy, delivered either in small, successive amounts, but spaced out, proves to be tolerable, while a single large amount would be fatal.
But setting off small earthquakes doesn't just damage the rope, it also lowers the anvil. Also the anvil in our analogy is constantly getting heavier, so the chances of our rope holding forever are very low
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.
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.
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.
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 (at least in terms of execution for various war crimes committed by Imperial Japanese forces). 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.
Yes there was. They didn’t surrender, and the US intended to make it look like they had an enormous number of bombs even though the next was weeks away
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
> Since the treaty's opening for signature in 1996, only sixteen nuclear tests have been conducted, all by non-signatory states: Pokhran-II by India and Chagai-I by Pakistan in May 1998, and six tests by North Korea from 2006 to 2017.
There have always been earthquakes in Korea. They are just typically quite weak. Though the south region that is closer to Japan has experienced some intense ones, but nothing like the massive ones they have in Japan.
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.
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.
I've been thinking about nukes lately (way too much, in fact). And, IMO, the only people who want nuclear weapons are national leaders. If the US invaded North Korea tomorrow, then NK has three options:
1) Launch nukes at the US. The minute those missiles leave their silos, the US will launch theirs. Even assuming the best case of no other nations joining in, most residents of NK and many residents of the US are either dead or going to die soon. The leaders of NK are probably dead.
2) Fight a conventional war. NK will probably hold out fairly well using drones. If they learned from Iran's diffuse decision-making in the military, they'll do even better. They might hold off the US long enough for peace talks. Leadership has a chance to survive, more so if they flee to China or Russia.
3) Capitulate immediately. Leadership flees to China or Russia, and the US probably lets them. The citizens aren't massacred or conscripted into a massacre, and they go on living their lives.
For NK citizens, the order from best to worst is scenario 3, 2, then 1 (if NK had good human rights, the order would be 2, 3, then 1). For pragmatic leadership, it's 2, 3, then 1. For crazy leadership, it's 1, 2, then 3. In the long run, every country will have a crazy ruler.
And that applies to any two countries. If Russia invaded the US tomorrow, I'd prefer we put up a good fight with conventional weapons, and then surrender if that fails. No nukes. I would rather live a mean life under Putin than watch my family suffer radiation poisoning. At least there's a chance of improvement and rebellion with the former.
Thinking more about it, is there any good circumstantial evidence that nukes have deterred war? Conventional war between any major powers would be devastating to everyone's economy. When the USSR was falling apart, they knew it was because of their own system and choices. Was would have just made things worse. The US goes to war with weaker nations and still leaves before winning, because we're a democracy and wars are very unpopular.
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.
imagine the decades of quakes US will set off with the bunker buster they are now developing for Pickaxe Mountain (Iran, solid granite rock, one mile deep)
billions more drained from our economy and I bet the irony is it will be nuclear somehow
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.
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.
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.
Energy is logarithmic with magnitude, but if the underlying model is analogous to springs being loaded and suddenly released, that model is quadratic in energy with distance.
The article cites 1399 detectable follow-on earthquakes. If each of them represented a movement of earth an equal distance as compared to a 30K times energy single event, each of those movements would be 1/173th in scale and therefore ~2x10^-7 in energy per event.
I think that's clearly better. In order to take the same ratio of distance that would represent a factor of 30K, but to spread it across the article's 1399,
So even if this does release pressure with no negative side effects anywhere it isn’t actually useful for preventing “the big one”.
At least naturally, faults release almost all their energy in the few largest events. You never see enough small earthquakes that you would "release slowly" that amount of energy. It would really need to be several orders of magnitude of more energy being released slowly.
It can go either way, you might get a relief of pressure or you might get an increased destabilisation in the region.
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
Have you considered logarithms?
Are fires and earthquakes the same?
it would appear nobody here knows. We probably ought to shut up until a seismologist decides to chime in
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.
I don’t think this is a good analogy.
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.
Yeah, I mean, I understand the words you wrote. I don't think it's a good analogy.
It is entirely feasible that the same amount of potential energy, delivered either in small, successive amounts, but spaced out, proves to be tolerable, while a single large amount would be fatal.
But setting off small earthquakes doesn't just damage the rope, it also lowers the anvil. Also the anvil in our analogy is constantly getting heavier, so the chances of our rope holding forever are very low
I think this is analogus to lowering it bit by bit in small but manageable head bonks.
The issue is the mechanism of "lowering" it. You're not giving it more slack.
We set off explosives to control avalanche risk.
How does the energy for the nuke itself factor into the equation though?
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.
Yeah, no.
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.
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.
How long until someone attempts to diffuse a pent up fault line via nuclear geoengineering?
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.
Typo: prescribed burns.
One of the most ridiculous pairs of approximate homophones in the English language.
Proscribed = forbidden. Prescribed = recommended/required.
Whoops, thanks.
If they can’t build high speed rail along the corridor then surely they cannot geo engineer it either!
Below ground nuclear geoengineering should be legally much simpler especially if it's deep enough to not significantly impact mineral rights claims.
>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.
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 (at least in terms of execution for various war crimes committed by Imperial Japanese forces). 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.
I think this single image from 1945 captures everything about the situation with Japan at the time, and what went into the decision making.[1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Fighting_Corps#/medi...
There is no excuse for the second bomb.
Yes there was. They didn’t surrender, and the US intended to make it look like they had an enormous number of bombs even though the next was weeks away
So possible in less regulated countries but not in the US. Here I think it would be far too much of a legal liability.
nuclear acupuncture
It's been theorized and allegedly attempted - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tectonic_weapon
Never, fer get it, in a word, insurance.
Project Plowshare says hello:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
The soviets reportedly used nukes to cap uncontrolled leaking oil wells - https://www.npr.org/2010/06/04/127473704/stopping-a-spill-th...
Sounds like a plot for a Superhero movie ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_(1978_film)
Dibs on Otisburg.
More like a bond villain plot. Nefarious under the guise of altruism. And a volcano lair.
Not exactly a superhero movie, but The Core (2003) is kinda related
Personally I was thinking of the Bond movie "A View To Kill" (the plot to destroy Silicon Valley through activating the San Andreas fault).
That might be tempting if the techbros achieve their post-democracy ideal... ;-)
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
The long delay is the interesting part to me. How do they distinguish earthquakes triggered by the test from normal background seismicity?
Sounds like climate change induced disasters, and why it’s so easy to not take responsibility.
Curious how we never get articles about the harm caused by western countries nuclear tests...
Well, they haven't conducted any since 1996.
> Since the treaty's opening for signature in 1996, only sixteen nuclear tests have been conducted, all by non-signatory states: Pokhran-II by India and Chagai-I by Pakistan in May 1998, and six tests by North Korea from 2006 to 2017.
because they're not doing them anymore
Basically, they gave their land Atrial Fibrillation through strong extrasystoles.
20 km isn't that far away but still shocking.
It isn't geological destabilization. They've awakened Godzilla.
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
So does that mean the Korean Peninsula is no longer a geologically safe region from earthquakes going forward? That's scary.
Never has been: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_South_K...
There have always been earthquakes in Korea. They are just typically quite weak. Though the south region that is closer to Japan has experienced some intense ones, but nothing like the massive ones they have in Japan.
Endless captcha loop for me, is there an archive? (archive.ph etc. has the same issue for me)
sure, https://archive.is/xjmvA
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.
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...?
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.
That headline is tabloid tier bs. They haven't established anything close to causation. Do better, science.org.
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.
I've been thinking about nukes lately (way too much, in fact). And, IMO, the only people who want nuclear weapons are national leaders. If the US invaded North Korea tomorrow, then NK has three options:
1) Launch nukes at the US. The minute those missiles leave their silos, the US will launch theirs. Even assuming the best case of no other nations joining in, most residents of NK and many residents of the US are either dead or going to die soon. The leaders of NK are probably dead.
2) Fight a conventional war. NK will probably hold out fairly well using drones. If they learned from Iran's diffuse decision-making in the military, they'll do even better. They might hold off the US long enough for peace talks. Leadership has a chance to survive, more so if they flee to China or Russia.
3) Capitulate immediately. Leadership flees to China or Russia, and the US probably lets them. The citizens aren't massacred or conscripted into a massacre, and they go on living their lives.
For NK citizens, the order from best to worst is scenario 3, 2, then 1 (if NK had good human rights, the order would be 2, 3, then 1). For pragmatic leadership, it's 2, 3, then 1. For crazy leadership, it's 1, 2, then 3. In the long run, every country will have a crazy ruler.
And that applies to any two countries. If Russia invaded the US tomorrow, I'd prefer we put up a good fight with conventional weapons, and then surrender if that fails. No nukes. I would rather live a mean life under Putin than watch my family suffer radiation poisoning. At least there's a chance of improvement and rebellion with the former.
Thinking more about it, is there any good circumstantial evidence that nukes have deterred war? Conventional war between any major powers would be devastating to everyone's economy. When the USSR was falling apart, they knew it was because of their own system and choices. Was would have just made things worse. The US goes to war with weaker nations and still leaves before winning, because we're a democracy and wars are very unpopular.
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.
imagine the decades of quakes US will set off with the bunker buster they are now developing for Pickaxe Mountain (Iran, solid granite rock, one mile deep)
billions more drained from our economy and I bet the irony is it will be nuclear somehow