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Due to the move of the blog to Wordpress posts from Jan 2012 onward will have commenting disabled (when I remember to do it)
Cheers - AE

Thursday, 17 March 2011

Well, someone was going to say it

It being "Could global warming be causing recent earthquakes?" Yes, really.

I'm in some considerable pain in wrist and head from the associated facepalm so all I'll say about it is that I saw it over at Watts Up With That where Anthony Watts says:
I’m always amazed at the lack of historical perspective some people have related to natural disasters. It’s doubly amazing when reporters who work in newspapers, who have huge archive resources at their disposal, don’t even bother to look.
Before adding a few examples of the kind of historical perspective he's thinking of. The only thing I'd add - and I owe a tip of the Akubra to someone since I saw it on a blog, but can't remember where - is that if it was true that melting ice was triggering quakes wouldn't it be affecting Scotland, Scandinavia and Iceland as well? Or did the big melt thousands of years ago take care of it, in which case why wouldn't it have done likewise for North America?

Here's an idea. We live on a big ball of rock which is prone to frequent (on a planetary scale) though mercifully small (also on a planetary scale) disasters, but because of our own sense of scales being many orders of magnitude smaller we have a tendency to go "what the fuck, that never used to happen, it must be us" every time something happens. Human arrogance is being blamed for disaster, when generally it's really only culpable of causing the belief that humans even have the power to do so much.

Shit happens and sometimes it kills you. Accept it, and move on with your lives.

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Actually been over to yours and commented already. I'm afraid I think it equally unlikely. The ice and weight distribution thing actually does have some known validity since we do know the weight of the caps in the ice age did distort the crust, and that this has been slowly flexing back again since the ice retreated. The silly part is thinking that there'll have been any significant difference in the last century. As for the nukes idea you mention, as I said in the long comment which vanished, presumably to Blogger's Purgatory of Suspected Spam, I think that there are possible effects but that almost certainly any man made signal is going to be lost in the noise. Furthering my doubts is that the years of nuke testing in Nevada within a few hundred km of the San Andreas fault seem not to have done much there and also that a 5 megaton underground explosion - America's largest - took place less than 250km from the Aleutian fault apparently caused not so much as a seismic sneeze (other than the tremor from the explosion itself) when the fault had already proven capable of producing a quake of 9.2 magnitude (six times more powerful than Japan's).

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