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.
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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 single event, each of those movements would be 1/1399th in scale and therefore ~5x10^-7 in energy per event. (One two-millionth.)
I think that's clearly better.
So even if this does release pressure with no negative side effects anywhere it isn’t actually useful for preventing “the big one”.
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
By definition, a black swan event cannot be predicted. It doesn't just mean "a larger fire" or "the event of a lifetime".
I’m not sure if “let fires burn a bit more” is exactly what we’re after but hazard reduction burns are absolutely a thing and are an essential part of fire risk management. I don’t think your post deserved to get slammed like that.
The region can build up resistance to big fires by having small fires.
Yeah that’s what I’m talking about
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
What would a size scientist know about fires or earthquakes anyways
They'd know how big they are, obviously.
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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.
I think the real problem is that you don't know whether it's a good analogy in your situation. You don't know whether you're lowering the anvil or just fraying the rope. It depends on a lot of hard-to-measure things about your whole geologic situation.
It makes sense to me, if you consider that a "damaged rope" is a bit more elastic, so it stretches more, and allows the anvil to come to rest at a marginally lower position above your head. But only marginally.
In other words, it'd probably a terrible tradeoff to reduce the impact of some disaster by 0.0001% at the expense of making it 0.1% more likely/frequent to occur.
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.
That's what they said about slowly lowering potential energy.
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.
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.
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.
We set off explosives to control avalanche risk.
How does the energy for the nuke itself factor into the equation though?
A 150kt nuke has like 500,000x the energy release of a mag 3.0 earthquake, but as the article mentions that energy went into the original magnitude 6.3 event.
Yeah, no.
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Good opportunity to make a killing as all that new beachfront property opens up.
Before Blackrock buys and sells them at 50000% markup