3 ms·
I wonder if someday we'd be able to trigger small earthquakes to release pressure gradually and prevent larger and more destructive earthquakes.
by lxe 8y ago
I wonder if someday we'd be able to trigger small earthquakes to release pressure gradually and prevent larger and more destructive earthquakes.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 8y agoOr if there's a military that will use this to trigger earthquakes.
- joshuakcockrell 8y agoIt would be the equivalent of controlled burns to prevent larger forest fires. That would be very interesting to see applied to earthquakes.
- Merad 8y agoSeems unlikely, because the Richter scale is logarithmic. For example, to bleed off the energy released by this magnitude 5.4 earthquake, you'd have to trigger 125000 magnitude 2.0 quakes. Fun little calculator on the USGS site: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/calculator.php https://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/calculator.php
- daniel-cussen 8y agoThis may actually be useful in Chile because Chileans don't lose any sleep over a 5.4. Even a 7.0 is meh. You could even have timed earthquakes or just diffuse your earthquakes at noon on Sunday every week.
- invalidOrTaken 8y agoSure, but isn't this literally just a notation convention? There's big quakes and there's little quakes. But energy is still linear. The fact that a quake releasing 1/3 of the energy of a 6.0 is not denoted as 2.0 quake, does not mean that it isn't releasing 1/3 of the energy. I'm not a quakologist. Am I wrong?