North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes

rrbanffy about 2 hours ago 60 commentsRead Article on science.org

https://archive.is/xjmvA

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margalabargala•about 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•about 1 hour 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.

booi•about 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•20 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”.

jjk166•29 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•26 minutes ago

I don’t think this is a good analogy.

jjk166•16 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•18 minutes ago

I think this is analogus to lowering it bit by bit in small but manageable head bonks.

jjk166•12 minutes ago

The issue is the mechanism of "lowering" it. You're not giving it more slack.

andy_ppp•about 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•about 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•about 1 hour ago

Have you considered logarithms?

ImJamal•about 1 hour ago

Are fires and earthquakes the same?

bob1029•40 minutes ago

We set off explosives to control avalanche risk.

brightball•21 minutes ago

How does the energy for the nuke itself factor into the equation though?

micromacrofoot•about 1 hour 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.

ortusdux•about 2 hours ago

How long until someone attempts to diffuse a pent up fault line via nuclear geoengineering?

rtkwe•about 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•about 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•16 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•16 minutes ago

There is no excuse for the second bomb.

gmac•about 1 hour ago

Typo: prescribed burns.

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

Proscribed = forbidden. Prescribed = recommended/required.

rtkwe•15 minutes ago

Whoops, thanks.

christina97•about 1 hour ago

If they can’t build high speed rail along the corridor then surely they cannot geo engineer it either!

asdfman123•41 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.

onion2k•about 1 hour ago

It's been theorized and allegedly attempted - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tectonic_weapon

slater•about 1 hour ago

Project Plowshare says hello:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

ortusdux•about 1 hour ago

The soviets reportedly used nukes to cap uncontrolled leaking oil wells - https://www.npr.org/2010/06/04/127473704/stopping-a-spill-th...

metalman•about 1 hour ago

Never, fer get it, in a word, insurance.

mc32•about 1 hour ago

Sounds like a plot for a Superhero movie ;)

FuriouslyAdrift•about 1 hour ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_(1978_film)

sehugg•about 1 hour ago

Dibs on Otisburg.

ortusdux•43 minutes ago

More like a bond villain plot. Nefarious under the guise of altruism. And a volcano lair.

diabeetusman•about 1 hour ago

Not exactly a superhero movie, but The Core (2003) is kinda related

whizzter•about 1 hour ago

Personally I was thinking of the Bond movie "A View To Kill" (the plot to destroy Silicon Valley through activating the San Andreas fault).

make3•about 1 hour 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

elictronic•about 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•about 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.

ggg011012•about 1 hour ago

The long delay is the interesting part to me. How do they distinguish earthquakes triggered by the test from normal background seismicity?

Waterluvian•about 1 hour ago

Sounds like climate change induced disasters, and why it’s so easy to not take responsibility.

trumbitta2•about 1 hour ago

Basically, they gave their land Atrial Fibrillation through strong extrasystoles.

SoftTalker•about 1 hour ago

It isn't geological destabilization. They've awakened Godzilla.

ck2•4 minutes ago

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

artur_makly•35 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•about 1 hour ago

So does that mean the Korean Peninsula is no longer a geologically safe region from earthquakes going forward? That's scary.

BigTTYGothGF•10 minutes ago

Never has been: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_South_K...

eu-tech-tak•about 1 hour ago

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.

willmadden•25 minutes ago

That headline is tabloid tier bs. They haven't established anything close to causation. Do better, science.org.

shevy-java•42 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•9 minutes 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•about 2 hours ago

Endless captcha loop for me, is there an archive? (archive.ph etc. has the same issue for me)

ENOMEM•about 2 hours ago

sure, https://archive.is/xjmvA

ranger_danger•about 1 hour 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•34 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•43 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.