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The key claim in the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.12310.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.12310.pdf) is that there are detectable changes in cosmic ray activi

The key claim in the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.12310.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.12310.pdf) is that there are detectable changes in cosmic ray activity around 15 days before major seismic events. One posited mechanism is that stuff happens deep in the earth that affects the magnetic field first, and then kicks off some big earthquake. But they don't rule out loopier ideas (like sunspot activity driving changes in the Earth's dynamo that then kick off earthquakes). One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind, just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal. I'd love to hear the opinion of someone who knows this field on the soundness of this research.

hammock 3y ago
if the mechanism is true, could this information be used by humans to control earthquakes? There have always been a lot of theories around projects like HAARP that have the capability to send a lot of energy deep into the earth.
- athenot 3y ago
  Maybe not control but the ability to have an advance warning would be a huge gain in terms of public safety.
  - ozgung 3y ago
    “There may or may not be an earthquake somewhere in the world, including oceans, in 15 days” is not a very useful warning though, if not harmful.
    - hammock 3y ago
      It would be better than anything else we have at the moment
      - CaveTech 3y ago
        It really isn't? There is no specificity, it also doesn't state that earthquakes _only_ happen after solar activity. So this is equivalent to saying "There could be an earthquake somewhere at any time in the future".
        detrites 3y ago
        With distributed ray detectors and suitable modeling of inner earth processes, assuming that the premise is correct - seems it may have potential to work? Ie, maybe able to generate the level of specificity required. EDIT: Also there aren't that many places on earth at high risk of earthquake that also have poor construction, etc. Meaning any advance warning, that a significant quake may hit somewhere, can trigger "battening down the hatches".
        toast0 3y ago
        You'd have to get a theory of why the rays correlate to earthquakes to have a usable model. Realistically, if you live in a place with poor construction and relatively large earthquake risk, the sensible thing is to always have your emergency kit ready to go. Chances are, you have other infrastructure issues anyway, so keeping a week or so of emergency rations and water available might come in handy more often than somewhere that has tigher building codes (and enforcement). It would likely be hard for everyone to prep within the same two week window anyway. But, if it was quite specific and accurate, relief organizations could begin staging and start traveling to be closer and quicker to respond. Doesn't seem like it's anywhere close to that from descriptions in this thread.
      - dylan604 3y ago
        Personally, I prefer waiting for all of the animals to seek higher ground as my seismic activity indicator.
        detrites 3y ago
        Seems figuring out what it is they're doing and duplicating it would be a straightforward thing to do. Surely there's a research group working on it?
    - jjk166 3y ago
      If the increase in cosmic ray detections is due to some change in Earth's magnetic field, presumably where and how the magnetic field changes would in some way correlate with the activity.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      If the magnitude of the quake can be estimated from it, it can be somewhat useful for response agencies in earthquake and tsunami prone areas to make sure their ducks are in a row. Kind of like how storm season tends to make people make sure their emergency supplies are in order, even if their area doesn't tend to get hit by big storms.
- idlewords 3y ago
  Pumping lots of water into the ground is a pretty reliable way to get earthquakes. Notice that Oklahoma, which used to be seismically inert, is now a bright red spot on the USGS map of the United States. This is due almost entirely to petrochemical-related human activity.
  - jandrewrogers 3y ago
    Oklahoma is not seismically inert. The region has active fault systems that have always generated earthquakes. Injecting fluids into faults can trigger earthquakes, essentially pulling future earthquakes forward in time.
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
  I think you vastly underestimate the scale and energies involved in geological processes. HAARP is a ~4 megawatt radio transmitter. That's it. It doesn't have mysterious unknown abilities to send energy deep underground.
  - detrites 3y ago
    Theorising I've seen on this - though, I don't recall where - suggested targeting resonances with HAARP in a similar way to how a human singer can shatter a wineglass, by projecting the crystals frequency, causing it to oscillate itself to pieces. That is high-watt transmission power may not be required. And further, it was suggested it's not done in isolation by HAARP but cooperatively with various transmitters also transmitting the same frequency at the same target - using standing waves. It makes sense conceptually as an idea but I'm not sure there if there's any evidence of it?
    - AnotherGoodName 3y ago
      The HAARP conspiracy theories are fun and date back to the old days of conspiracy theories when people wore tin foil hats and worried about government mind rays. Not at all based in reality or sensible but at least those conspiracies were harmless and non-political. Anyway... no there's no evidence. But i do miss these classic conspiracy theories! Anyone remember the X-Files episode featuring HAARP?
      - toast0 3y ago
        So, the thing is tin foil hats do protect against the government mind rays; but aluminum foil hats don't. And too many people are wearing aluminum foil hats, and then the government mind rays work, and then they spout different conspiracy theories, planted by the government mind rays. And those conspiracy theories get traction, because they're spouted by people in metal hats. It all comes back to the mind rays.
drunkencoder 3y ago
So it will work for all historical earth quakes :) Sounds a bit like some climate research. Tune model parameters until it perfectly match historical data. This should be possible to debunk in shorter time though
olivermarks 3y ago
Why is 'sunspot activity driving changes in the Earth's dynamo that then kick off earthquakes' a loopy idea? We are hours away from coronal mass ejection catastrophe right now as solar cycle 20 builds in intensity. It seems reasonable to me that the complex relationship between the moon's gravitational pull and massive sun activity could affect our tiny little planet
- idlewords 3y ago
  The idea is loopy because the energy that reaches the earth from even a massive solar flare is orders of magnitude less than the energy released by a major earthquake, and that is orders of magnitudes less than the energies that drive the dynamo in the Earth's core. It's possible for a falling leaf to hit a mountain in just such a way that it dislodges a boulder balanced on top, but you need to tell a pretty compelling story about why this sensitive arrangement came about. Similarly, you'd need to explain how gigatons of molten iron sloshing around deep underground might feel the kiss of the Sun in just such a way that it levels San Francisco (for example).
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    when people say "orders of magnitude" do they always mean base 10? (i'm thinking of how decibels are a log scale sort of thing wrt power, where "orders of magnitude" used as a cliche probably does not mean what it would be read as.)
    - heyjamesknight 3y ago
      I usually interpret it as "scales geometrically and not arithmetically".
      - lanstin 3y ago
        That seems confusing. If I say my new service is orders of magnitude more efficient than previous services, I don’t mean any thing about scaling but current performance, and I wouldn’t say orders of magnitude if it was just twice as many calls/second/core, but more than ten, or really more than 30, halfway between ten and a hundred, logarithmically. Something that scales geometrically might well have some giant constant so it isn’t useful until a specific performance regime.
klipt 3y ago
It's fine to form a hypothesis from old data ... but it's not a theory yet until that hypothesis is challenged by (and isn't falsified by) future data :-)
- EA-3167 3y ago
  This is doubly true when we're talking about predicting earthquakes, a practice that has had no successes and a LOT of notable failures.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- TimTheTinker 3y ago
  Does old data discovered in the future count?
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    Yes it does. Because you didn't use it to overfit your model. Same goes for data that you had in the last but decided to ignore while building the model. In both cases there is a legitimate risk of cheating. The only data that you cannot cheat about is future data.
phoenixstrike 3y ago
This is good research. >One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind, just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal. There is nothing wrong with this. In fact this is how most science is done. This is pure experiment - try things and see what comes up. You're conflating this step with step three of the general way things have traditionally been done in physics: 1. An experiment shows a previously unexplained phenomena. 2. A theory is made to explain the results and predict the results of a future experiment. 3. A future experiment is undertaken with this theory in mind, to see if it has predictive power. If the predictions are correct, it is a good theory. Your comment is referring to step three. The experiment in the paper is step one.
- DangerousPie 3y ago
  It's fine if they account for the number of tests they have made when they calculate their significance levels. If they just kept on trying different options until they ended up with p < 0.05 it's almost guaranteed to be noise.
  - ordu 3y ago
    They used p<0.001. It is not social sciences, there anti-noise filters are stricter.
    - elcritch 3y ago
      Ah that's not too bad. Though to be fair you also need the data size. That's only what one in a 1k chance (or is it 10k? Too lazy to count it out). If their dataset is small or they automated testing cofactors there's still a decent chance of false probability.
- dekhn 3y ago
  While I don't disagree with your description, there is an awful lot of scientific output which is really just fishing for significance (IE, runnings lots of tests without corrections), publication, claim credit for discovering something, and it never actually gets followed-up on to see if the claim generalizes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging I think probably the most important thing is to get scientists to spend more time identifying and teasing out correlated variables to identify plausible mechanisms.
colechristensen 3y ago
Fishing expeditions are fine, they are not wrong by themselves, the just require followup. Now that somebody found a signal that seems to predict earthquakes, start trying to predict earthquakes. Dig into the signals and gather new ones to try to see if there is any more information available.
- delecti 3y ago
  Agreed. And it seems so obvious that it makes me wonder why this doesn't include that. It says they started in 2016; they couldn't wait another year to say "we spent 7 years identifying this trend, and then a year predicting major earthquakes"?
01100011 3y ago
Or there's a common trigger event, like, say, a large gravitational wave or a passing cloud of weakly interacting matter(dark matter?) which triggers both increased cosmic ray emissions along with earthquakes. Not that I believe any of this, but it seems we're just pulling stuff out of our asses so I figured I'd give it a shot.
- dmead 3y ago
  we should definitely just reverse the shield polarity and be done by the third act. hopefully the robot can learn a lesson about humanity before the end credits.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    I’m afraid only the power of love and empathy and togetherness can resolve this climax
    - rationalist 3y ago
      Discovery will probably be the only Star Trek show that I never finish watching. So far season 1 of Strange New Worlds has been pretty good. (And each season of Picard was way better than the previous.)
      - dmead 3y ago
        Same. The first season was enough for me. Never again.
- kanzenryu2 3y ago
  One aspect of gravity waves is that other than being extremely weak, they cannot perform work. So they don't cause mechanical forces.
  - hughesjj 3y ago
    Wait, really? Why not? That's fascinating Edit: ah, you mean for any practical purposes. Duh.
zackees 3y ago
“Fringe scientists” have been saying that cosmic and solar particles have been causing earthquakes for a long time. It seems counter intuitive but an analogy is very simple: A 15 mph breeze will do almost nothing to push a person, but will exert tremendous force on a sail of sufficient size. Earth, in this analogy, is a really big sail.
- vanderZwan 3y ago
  The counter-argument is equally simple: a sail is a surface. The earth is a sphere. A sphere made of solid rock the size of a sail will be even less moved by a 15 mph breeze than this hypothetical person.
  - blueprint 3y ago
    you're missing the analogy. the surface area of the sail is the entire volume of eg piezoelectrically responsive rocks - so it's a gigantic sail
  - zackees 3y ago
    We aren't talking about the earth being blown off course though, just that there is a large amount of energy that was previously unaccounted for and that this energy is large enough to trigger an earth quake at vulnerable parts.
    - idlewords 3y ago
      Do the back-of-the-envelope computation of how much energy reaches Earth from a coronal mass ejection and see how well your idea holds up. (a typical flare is 10^16 grams of matter moving at about 450 km/sec)
      - CrimsonRain 3y ago
        You don't need a ton of energy to set off a possible chain reaction events.
      - 3y ago
formerly_proven 3y ago
> One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way ... just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal. That's just p-hacking.
- idlewords 3y ago
  Thank you! That's the term I was looking for but couldn't remember.
jvanderbot 3y ago
Precursor signals for earthquakes is a field that has about as much credibility as astrology, from the few conversations I've had with professional geologists and planetary scientists. I had a minor and short-lived role in designing a sensor network that might be useful for these kinds of low-signal, high-noise precursors, and I got nothing but strange looks from actual geologists.
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  There are plenty of precursors for an earthquake. Or maybe there are none. But it doesn't much matter because timescales of earthquakes can be thousands or more of years. While timescales of data is about a hundred years.
- musicale 3y ago
  > as much credibility as astrology If this sort of scientific astrology ends up providing precursor signals for future earthquakes, why would geologists have a problem with it?
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    You're assuming an a priori bias. Astrology didn't lose favor because of some societal decree, it lost favor because it had no predictive power. It seems to be the same with analysis of precursor signals, and the subfield apparently went a little nuts and started to sound like quackery and data fudging.
    - musicale 3y ago
      Were geologists skeptical of the actual data from your sensor network?
      - jvanderbot 3y ago
        (editing to hit a moving target) We started the study with a good faith survey and intent to use space and ground signals in sync to detect impending earthquakes on nearish term. We had good technologists and scientists. As the study went on it became clear that all the scientists were completely unconvinced. Sure we could have built out the network but it wouldn't have done much. Most the scientists either lost faith or write dissenting opinions as part of the report. We did our job putting out the report but it was clear there was nothing to do after.
jl6 3y ago
> One posited mechanism is that stuff happens deep in the earth that affects the magnetic field first, and then kicks off some big earthquake. If this was real, would it not be easier to measure the perturbation of the magnetic field than measure the cosmic rays being let in by the perturbed magnetic field?
- opello 3y ago
  This was my thought as well since it seems rather obvious I wonder why it wasn't the approach taken.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  The relationship between cosmic rays and Earth's magnetic field is well studied, and actively monitored: http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/education/earthmag.html http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/education/earthmag.html However, it's a more complex data set to work with, given the vast dimensional dynamics of the field itself vs measuring the flux of radiation.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
Given the planet is one big ol' magnet, it seems at least plausible to see interactions?
bryan0 3y ago
> One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind, just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal. I believe in particle physics this is known as the “look-elsewhere effect”. Basically if look long and hard enough for a pattern, you will eventual find it if your parameter space is large enough: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect
- GolDDranks 3y ago
  The obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- jaggederest 3y ago
  This is related to the fact that in a higher-dimensional space the hamming distance between two points is compact, compared to 2d/3d intuition. This problem is related to the way that e.g. embedding text into an AI for comparison purposes often produces surprisingly closely related vector distances for relatively unrelated strings.
- Ringz 3y ago
  Can we transfer this to the financial markets?
- madrox 3y ago
  When I was taught statistics, this was regularly brought up as a big no-no in science. However, I read a guide to practical statistics that had a gem about predicting the stock market. If we discovered surges in the market correlated to newspaper sales, we wouldn't discard this as look-elsewhere. In fact, we'd follow newspaper sales very closely. Predicting earthquakes has a big upside for humanity. If there is even a small correlation -- even if we don't yet understand it -- we can benefit from it.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    It can be useful, it's just you need to keep monitoring it: if the effect seems to shrink or disappear on future tests, it's probably spurious.
anigbrowl 3y ago
One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind That seems like an extremely good thing to me. Looking for patterns and then figuring out causality later is a great way to solve real-world problems. Of course you can be led astray if your filters are too open, but if your work is rigorous and you still come out with a 6-sigma correlation then congratulations, you found a signal. What does it mean? How does it work? Who cares, there's plenty of time to figure that out. But in the meantime you can hypothesize that the connection exists, monitor it for a year or two, and if the correlation holds up and turns out to have some predictive value, then a winner is you.
- idlewords 3y ago
  If you dredge through enough random data, you will always find a six sigma correlation (or five, or however many sigmas you want), kind of by definition. This is why experimenters like particle physicists or gravitational wave astronomers who have petabytes of raw data have to define their criteria in advance, instead of just going to town looking for patterns. I agree with you that if this observation proves to have predictive power, then the way it was found doesn't matter. But right now we're at the less reliable "we looked at all conceivable retroactive combinations of stuff and found this pattern" stage of the process.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    It wasn't entirely clear to me, but seems they've taken care of the look-elsewhere effect[1]. If so, that's at least something, no? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect
  - stainablesteel 3y ago
    both are valid strategies, what i think is bad is when groups of people claim that broad sweeping searches are all bogus and that you must have a priori knowledge to be relevant. there should be people dredging through petabytes of cern data like this, exploratory analysis can give you insight into things you didn't know to look for. even if you find things that are bogus you figure out why and learn how to avoid it given the context of the data. to say otherwise becomes a hindrance to progress. plus its not like we have any other way of predicting earthquakes, trying to read the magnetic field to predict events sounds really promising, i'd be willing to give it a shot even if it is bogus, that's just risk assessment.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
Newton observed that the apple fell from a tree. He then noted that it was the apple that moved, not the Earth.
refibrillator 3y ago
> looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind A bit of skepticism is healthy but some of these threads are approaching downright dismissive. There's a long history of research in this area to be aware of, though I know the paper in question doesn't elaborate on it. Here's one physical theory for you, straight from NASA [1]. > In the ionosphere, the solar winds generate electrical currents. On the Earth surface, these currents cause magnetic field fluctuations. These fluctuations, penetrating the Earth interior, induce the electrical currents J, and, in the presence of the Earth magnetic field B, generate electromagnetic force, known as Lorentz force F = J × B. To study the relation of earthquakes and the Lorentz force, acting at the near onset times of strong earthquakes, we examine the Kp index, a logarithmic measure of the magnetic field deviation. The time varying Kp index gives us J, which in turn determines F. > The Lorentz force tilts the subtle force balance in the earth crust towards triggering the release of stress strain energy, initiating an earthquake in a similar way as a mountain climber’s step can trigger the avalanches. The internal dynamics, however, are highly statistical. > We find that the distinctive patterns of the Kp surges often strongly correlate to the onset of earthquake. This correlation depends on the seismic regions and the magnitudes of earthquakes. The stronger the earthquake is, more closely the Kp surge is associated. The statistical significance of nearly 100% is obtained for the Kp variations, synchronizing with more earthquakes in the Pacific Rim region. [1] Geomagnetic Kp Index and Earthquakes (2018) https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=82421 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
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  - refibrillator 3y ago
    [flagged]
- chrisco255 3y ago
  There have also been studies of cosmic rays inducing volcanic activity, as this study from Japan indicates: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234022172_Explosive_volcanic_eruptions_triggered_by_cosmic_rays_Volcano_as_a_bubble_chamber https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234022172_Explosive... "The strong negative correlation observed between the timing of silica-rich eruptions and solar activity can be explained by variations in cosmic-ray flux arising from solar modulation. Because silica-rich magma has relatively high surface tension (similar to 0.1 Nm(-1)), the homogeneous nucleation rate is so low that such magma exists in a highly supersaturated state without considerable exsolution, even when located relatively close to the surface, within the penetration range of cosmic-ray muons (1-10 GeV)."
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I feel like from my reading given they’re ground based stations that the major earthquake forming causes changes to the magnetosphere making cosmic ray activity appear to increase from the ground.
aemreunal 3y ago
Reminds me of: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations (There seems to be a lot of death-related stats in there, so beware if that's triggering)
siilikuin 3y ago
>One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind Isn't this the fundamental mystery about all science, in a way? You have to start with some kind of hypothesis, and that hypothesis likely comes from looking over various kinds of data and doing mysterious mental convolutions on them.
User23 3y ago
Hypotheses non fingo[1]. It's pretty cool how an extraordinary genius had extraordinary intellectual humility. And by humility I don't mean he was easy to get along with or self-deprecating, just that he knew his limitations. His groupies were another story of course. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo

hammock 3y ago

if the mechanism is true, could this information be used by humans to control earthquakes? There have always been a lot of theories around projects like HAARP that have the capability to send a lot of energy deep into the earth.

athenot 3y ago
Maybe not control but the ability to have an advance warning would be a huge gain in terms of public safety.
- ozgung 3y ago
  “There may or may not be an earthquake somewhere in the world, including oceans, in 15 days” is not a very useful warning though, if not harmful.
  - hammock 3y ago
    It would be better than anything else we have at the moment
    - CaveTech 3y ago
      It really isn't? There is no specificity, it also doesn't state that earthquakes _only_ happen after solar activity. So this is equivalent to saying "There could be an earthquake somewhere at any time in the future".
      - detrites 3y ago
        With distributed ray detectors and suitable modeling of inner earth processes, assuming that the premise is correct - seems it may have potential to work? Ie, maybe able to generate the level of specificity required. EDIT: Also there aren't that many places on earth at high risk of earthquake that also have poor construction, etc. Meaning any advance warning, that a significant quake may hit somewhere, can trigger "battening down the hatches".
        toast0 3y ago
        You'd have to get a theory of why the rays correlate to earthquakes to have a usable model. Realistically, if you live in a place with poor construction and relatively large earthquake risk, the sensible thing is to always have your emergency kit ready to go. Chances are, you have other infrastructure issues anyway, so keeping a week or so of emergency rations and water available might come in handy more often than somewhere that has tigher building codes (and enforcement). It would likely be hard for everyone to prep within the same two week window anyway. But, if it was quite specific and accurate, relief organizations could begin staging and start traveling to be closer and quicker to respond. Doesn't seem like it's anywhere close to that from descriptions in this thread.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      Personally, I prefer waiting for all of the animals to seek higher ground as my seismic activity indicator.
      - detrites 3y ago
        Seems figuring out what it is they're doing and duplicating it would be a straightforward thing to do. Surely there's a research group working on it?
  - jjk166 3y ago
    If the increase in cosmic ray detections is due to some change in Earth's magnetic field, presumably where and how the magnetic field changes would in some way correlate with the activity.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    If the magnitude of the quake can be estimated from it, it can be somewhat useful for response agencies in earthquake and tsunami prone areas to make sure their ducks are in a row. Kind of like how storm season tends to make people make sure their emergency supplies are in order, even if their area doesn't tend to get hit by big storms.
idlewords 3y ago
Pumping lots of water into the ground is a pretty reliable way to get earthquakes. Notice that Oklahoma, which used to be seismically inert, is now a bright red spot on the USGS map of the United States. This is due almost entirely to petrochemical-related human activity.
- jandrewrogers 3y ago
  Oklahoma is not seismically inert. The region has active fault systems that have always generated earthquakes. Injecting fluids into faults can trigger earthquakes, essentially pulling future earthquakes forward in time.
jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
I think you vastly underestimate the scale and energies involved in geological processes. HAARP is a ~4 megawatt radio transmitter. That's it. It doesn't have mysterious unknown abilities to send energy deep underground.
- detrites 3y ago
  Theorising I've seen on this - though, I don't recall where - suggested targeting resonances with HAARP in a similar way to how a human singer can shatter a wineglass, by projecting the crystals frequency, causing it to oscillate itself to pieces. That is high-watt transmission power may not be required. And further, it was suggested it's not done in isolation by HAARP but cooperatively with various transmitters also transmitting the same frequency at the same target - using standing waves. It makes sense conceptually as an idea but I'm not sure there if there's any evidence of it?
  - AnotherGoodName 3y ago
    The HAARP conspiracy theories are fun and date back to the old days of conspiracy theories when people wore tin foil hats and worried about government mind rays. Not at all based in reality or sensible but at least those conspiracies were harmless and non-political. Anyway... no there's no evidence. But i do miss these classic conspiracy theories! Anyone remember the X-Files episode featuring HAARP?
    - toast0 3y ago
      So, the thing is tin foil hats do protect against the government mind rays; but aluminum foil hats don't. And too many people are wearing aluminum foil hats, and then the government mind rays work, and then they spout different conspiracy theories, planted by the government mind rays. And those conspiracy theories get traction, because they're spouted by people in metal hats. It all comes back to the mind rays.

drunkencoder 3y ago

So it will work for all historical earth quakes :) Sounds a bit like some climate research. Tune model parameters until it perfectly match historical data. This should be possible to debunk in shorter time though

olivermarks 3y ago

Why is 'sunspot activity driving changes in the Earth's dynamo that then kick off earthquakes' a loopy idea? We are hours away from coronal mass ejection catastrophe right now as solar cycle 20 builds in intensity. It seems reasonable to me that the complex relationship between the moon's gravitational pull and massive sun activity could affect our tiny little planet

idlewords 3y ago
The idea is loopy because the energy that reaches the earth from even a massive solar flare is orders of magnitude less than the energy released by a major earthquake, and that is orders of magnitudes less than the energies that drive the dynamo in the Earth's core. It's possible for a falling leaf to hit a mountain in just such a way that it dislodges a boulder balanced on top, but you need to tell a pretty compelling story about why this sensitive arrangement came about. Similarly, you'd need to explain how gigatons of molten iron sloshing around deep underground might feel the kiss of the Sun in just such a way that it levels San Francisco (for example).
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  when people say "orders of magnitude" do they always mean base 10? (i'm thinking of how decibels are a log scale sort of thing wrt power, where "orders of magnitude" used as a cliche probably does not mean what it would be read as.)
  - heyjamesknight 3y ago
    I usually interpret it as "scales geometrically and not arithmetically".
    - lanstin 3y ago
      That seems confusing. If I say my new service is orders of magnitude more efficient than previous services, I don’t mean any thing about scaling but current performance, and I wouldn’t say orders of magnitude if it was just twice as many calls/second/core, but more than ten, or really more than 30, halfway between ten and a hundred, logarithmically. Something that scales geometrically might well have some giant constant so it isn’t useful until a specific performance regime.

klipt 3y ago

It's fine to form a hypothesis from old data ... but it's not a theory yet until that hypothesis is challenged by (and isn't falsified by) future data :-)

EA-3167 3y ago
This is doubly true when we're talking about predicting earthquakes, a practice that has had no successes and a LOT of notable failures.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
TimTheTinker 3y ago
Does old data discovered in the future count?
- ithkuil 3y ago
  Yes it does. Because you didn't use it to overfit your model. Same goes for data that you had in the last but decided to ignore while building the model. In both cases there is a legitimate risk of cheating. The only data that you cannot cheat about is future data.

phoenixstrike 3y ago

This is good research. >One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind, just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal. There is nothing wrong with this. In fact this is how most science is done. This is pure experiment - try things and see what comes up. You're conflating this step with step three of the general way things have traditionally been done in physics: 1. An experiment shows a previously unexplained phenomena. 2. A theory is made to explain the results and predict the results of a future experiment. 3. A future experiment is undertaken with this theory in mind, to see if it has predictive power. If the predictions are correct, it is a good theory. Your comment is referring to step three. The experiment in the paper is step one.

DangerousPie 3y ago
It's fine if they account for the number of tests they have made when they calculate their significance levels. If they just kept on trying different options until they ended up with p < 0.05 it's almost guaranteed to be noise.
- ordu 3y ago
  They used p<0.001. It is not social sciences, there anti-noise filters are stricter.
  - elcritch 3y ago
    Ah that's not too bad. Though to be fair you also need the data size. That's only what one in a 1k chance (or is it 10k? Too lazy to count it out). If their dataset is small or they automated testing cofactors there's still a decent chance of false probability.
dekhn 3y ago
While I don't disagree with your description, there is an awful lot of scientific output which is really just fishing for significance (IE, runnings lots of tests without corrections), publication, claim credit for discovering something, and it never actually gets followed-up on to see if the claim generalizes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging I think probably the most important thing is to get scientists to spend more time identifying and teasing out correlated variables to identify plausible mechanisms.

colechristensen 3y ago

Fishing expeditions are fine, they are not wrong by themselves, the just require followup. Now that somebody found a signal that seems to predict earthquakes, start trying to predict earthquakes. Dig into the signals and gather new ones to try to see if there is any more information available.

delecti 3y ago
Agreed. And it seems so obvious that it makes me wonder why this doesn't include that. It says they started in 2016; they couldn't wait another year to say "we spent 7 years identifying this trend, and then a year predicting major earthquakes"?

01100011 3y ago

Or there's a common trigger event, like, say, a large gravitational wave or a passing cloud of weakly interacting matter(dark matter?) which triggers both increased cosmic ray emissions along with earthquakes. Not that I believe any of this, but it seems we're just pulling stuff out of our asses so I figured I'd give it a shot.

dmead 3y ago
we should definitely just reverse the shield polarity and be done by the third act. hopefully the robot can learn a lesson about humanity before the end credits.
- civilitty 3y ago
  I’m afraid only the power of love and empathy and togetherness can resolve this climax
  - rationalist 3y ago
    Discovery will probably be the only Star Trek show that I never finish watching. So far season 1 of Strange New Worlds has been pretty good. (And each season of Picard was way better than the previous.)
    - dmead 3y ago
      Same. The first season was enough for me. Never again.
kanzenryu2 3y ago
One aspect of gravity waves is that other than being extremely weak, they cannot perform work. So they don't cause mechanical forces.
- hughesjj 3y ago
  Wait, really? Why not? That's fascinating Edit: ah, you mean for any practical purposes. Duh.

zackees 3y ago

“Fringe scientists” have been saying that cosmic and solar particles have been causing earthquakes for a long time. It seems counter intuitive but an analogy is very simple: A 15 mph breeze will do almost nothing to push a person, but will exert tremendous force on a sail of sufficient size. Earth, in this analogy, is a really big sail.

vanderZwan 3y ago
The counter-argument is equally simple: a sail is a surface. The earth is a sphere. A sphere made of solid rock the size of a sail will be even less moved by a 15 mph breeze than this hypothetical person.
- blueprint 3y ago
  you're missing the analogy. the surface area of the sail is the entire volume of eg piezoelectrically responsive rocks - so it's a gigantic sail
- zackees 3y ago
  We aren't talking about the earth being blown off course though, just that there is a large amount of energy that was previously unaccounted for and that this energy is large enough to trigger an earth quake at vulnerable parts.
  - idlewords 3y ago
    Do the back-of-the-envelope computation of how much energy reaches Earth from a coronal mass ejection and see how well your idea holds up. (a typical flare is 10^16 grams of matter moving at about 450 km/sec)
    - CrimsonRain 3y ago
      You don't need a ton of energy to set off a possible chain reaction events.
    - 3y ago

formerly_proven 3y ago

> One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way ... just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal. That's just p-hacking.

idlewords 3y ago
Thank you! That's the term I was looking for but couldn't remember.

jvanderbot 3y ago

Precursor signals for earthquakes is a field that has about as much credibility as astrology, from the few conversations I've had with professional geologists and planetary scientists. I had a minor and short-lived role in designing a sensor network that might be useful for these kinds of low-signal, high-noise precursors, and I got nothing but strange looks from actual geologists.

mnky9800n 3y ago
There are plenty of precursors for an earthquake. Or maybe there are none. But it doesn't much matter because timescales of earthquakes can be thousands or more of years. While timescales of data is about a hundred years.
musicale 3y ago
> as much credibility as astrology If this sort of scientific astrology ends up providing precursor signals for future earthquakes, why would geologists have a problem with it?
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  You're assuming an a priori bias. Astrology didn't lose favor because of some societal decree, it lost favor because it had no predictive power. It seems to be the same with analysis of precursor signals, and the subfield apparently went a little nuts and started to sound like quackery and data fudging.
  - musicale 3y ago
    Were geologists skeptical of the actual data from your sensor network?
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      (editing to hit a moving target) We started the study with a good faith survey and intent to use space and ground signals in sync to detect impending earthquakes on nearish term. We had good technologists and scientists. As the study went on it became clear that all the scientists were completely unconvinced. Sure we could have built out the network but it wouldn't have done much. Most the scientists either lost faith or write dissenting opinions as part of the report. We did our job putting out the report but it was clear there was nothing to do after.

jl6 3y ago

> One posited mechanism is that stuff happens deep in the earth that affects the magnetic field first, and then kicks off some big earthquake. If this was real, would it not be easier to measure the perturbation of the magnetic field than measure the cosmic rays being let in by the perturbed magnetic field?

opello 3y ago
This was my thought as well since it seems rather obvious I wonder why it wasn't the approach taken.
chrisco255 3y ago
The relationship between cosmic rays and Earth's magnetic field is well studied, and actively monitored: http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/education/earthmag.html http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/education/earthmag.html However, it's a more complex data set to work with, given the vast dimensional dynamics of the field itself vs measuring the flux of radiation.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

Given the planet is one big ol' magnet, it seems at least plausible to see interactions?

bryan0 3y ago

> One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind, just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal. I believe in particle physics this is known as the “look-elsewhere effect”. Basically if look long and hard enough for a pattern, you will eventual find it if your parameter space is large enough: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect

GolDDranks 3y ago
The obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
jaggederest 3y ago
This is related to the fact that in a higher-dimensional space the hamming distance between two points is compact, compared to 2d/3d intuition. This problem is related to the way that e.g. embedding text into an AI for comparison purposes often produces surprisingly closely related vector distances for relatively unrelated strings.
Ringz 3y ago
Can we transfer this to the financial markets?
madrox 3y ago
When I was taught statistics, this was regularly brought up as a big no-no in science. However, I read a guide to practical statistics that had a gem about predicting the stock market. If we discovered surges in the market correlated to newspaper sales, we wouldn't discard this as look-elsewhere. In fact, we'd follow newspaper sales very closely. Predicting earthquakes has a big upside for humanity. If there is even a small correlation -- even if we don't yet understand it -- we can benefit from it.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  It can be useful, it's just you need to keep monitoring it: if the effect seems to shrink or disappear on future tests, it's probably spurious.

anigbrowl 3y ago

One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind That seems like an extremely good thing to me. Looking for patterns and then figuring out causality later is a great way to solve real-world problems. Of course you can be led astray if your filters are too open, but if your work is rigorous and you still come out with a 6-sigma correlation then congratulations, you found a signal. What does it mean? How does it work? Who cares, there's plenty of time to figure that out. But in the meantime you can hypothesize that the connection exists, monitor it for a year or two, and if the correlation holds up and turns out to have some predictive value, then a winner is you.

idlewords 3y ago
If you dredge through enough random data, you will always find a six sigma correlation (or five, or however many sigmas you want), kind of by definition. This is why experimenters like particle physicists or gravitational wave astronomers who have petabytes of raw data have to define their criteria in advance, instead of just going to town looking for patterns. I agree with you that if this observation proves to have predictive power, then the way it was found doesn't matter. But right now we're at the less reliable "we looked at all conceivable retroactive combinations of stuff and found this pattern" stage of the process.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  It wasn't entirely clear to me, but seems they've taken care of the look-elsewhere effect[1]. If so, that's at least something, no? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect
- stainablesteel 3y ago
  both are valid strategies, what i think is bad is when groups of people claim that broad sweeping searches are all bogus and that you must have a priori knowledge to be relevant. there should be people dredging through petabytes of cern data like this, exploratory analysis can give you insight into things you didn't know to look for. even if you find things that are bogus you figure out why and learn how to avoid it given the context of the data. to say otherwise becomes a hindrance to progress. plus its not like we have any other way of predicting earthquakes, trying to read the magnetic field to predict events sounds really promising, i'd be willing to give it a shot even if it is bogus, that's just risk assessment.

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

Newton observed that the apple fell from a tree. He then noted that it was the apple that moved, not the Earth.

refibrillator 3y ago

> looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind A bit of skepticism is healthy but some of these threads are approaching downright dismissive. There's a long history of research in this area to be aware of, though I know the paper in question doesn't elaborate on it. Here's one physical theory for you, straight from NASA [1]. > In the ionosphere, the solar winds generate electrical currents. On the Earth surface, these currents cause magnetic field fluctuations. These fluctuations, penetrating the Earth interior, induce the electrical currents J, and, in the presence of the Earth magnetic field B, generate electromagnetic force, known as Lorentz force F = J × B. To study the relation of earthquakes and the Lorentz force, acting at the near onset times of strong earthquakes, we examine the Kp index, a logarithmic measure of the magnetic field deviation. The time varying Kp index gives us J, which in turn determines F. > The Lorentz force tilts the subtle force balance in the earth crust towards triggering the release of stress strain energy, initiating an earthquake in a similar way as a mountain climber’s step can trigger the avalanches. The internal dynamics, however, are highly statistical. > We find that the distinctive patterns of the Kp surges often strongly correlate to the onset of earthquake. This correlation depends on the seismic regions and the magnitudes of earthquakes. The stronger the earthquake is, more closely the Kp surge is associated. The statistical significance of nearly 100% is obtained for the Kp variations, synchronizing with more earthquakes in the Pacific Rim region. [1] Geomagnetic Kp Index and Earthquakes (2018) https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=82421 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...

SiempreViernes 3y ago
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- refibrillator 3y ago
  [flagged]
chrisco255 3y ago
There have also been studies of cosmic rays inducing volcanic activity, as this study from Japan indicates: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234022172_Explosive_volcanic_eruptions_triggered_by_cosmic_rays_Volcano_as_a_bubble_chamber https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234022172_Explosive... "The strong negative correlation observed between the timing of silica-rich eruptions and solar activity can be explained by variations in cosmic-ray flux arising from solar modulation. Because silica-rich magma has relatively high surface tension (similar to 0.1 Nm(-1)), the homogeneous nucleation rate is so low that such magma exists in a highly supersaturated state without considerable exsolution, even when located relatively close to the surface, within the penetration range of cosmic-ray muons (1-10 GeV)."

fnordpiglet 3y ago

I feel like from my reading given they’re ground based stations that the major earthquake forming causes changes to the magnetosphere making cosmic ray activity appear to increase from the ground.

aemreunal 3y ago

Reminds me of: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations (There seems to be a lot of death-related stats in there, so beware if that's triggering)

siilikuin 3y ago

>One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind Isn't this the fundamental mystery about all science, in a way? You have to start with some kind of hypothesis, and that hypothesis likely comes from looking over various kinds of data and doing mysterious mental convolutions on them.

User23 3y ago

Hypotheses non fingo[1]. It's pretty cool how an extraordinary genius had extraordinary intellectual humility. And by humility I don't mean he was easy to get along with or self-deprecating, just that he knew his limitations. His groupies were another story of course. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo