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Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

earth.com

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Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#41

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

hammock wrote: post #8
idlewords wrote: post #6

The key claim in the paper ( 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 the…

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.

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.

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#42

Post by bckr »

29athrowaway wrote: post #13

Unrolling tape produces x-rays. Is the radiation causing earthquakes or it is caused by earthquakes (due to some unknown phenomenon?)

One of the main hypotheses is that the earth’s dynamo (molten, magnetically active core) is emitting/redirecting the radiation.

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#44

Post by DangerousPie »

phoenixstrike wrote: post #39
idlewords wrote: post #6

The key claim in the paper ( 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 the…

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…

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.

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#45

Post by lanstin »

heyjamesknight wrote: post #31
jjtheblunt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I usually interpret it as "scales geometrically and not arithmetically".

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.

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#46

Post by dekhn »

phoenixstrike wrote: post #39
idlewords wrote: post #6

The key claim in the paper ( 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 the…

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…

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

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.

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#47

Post by lanstin »

aaomidi wrote: post #38
29athrowaway wrote: post #13

Unrolling tape produces x-rays. Is the radiation causing earthquakes or it is caused by earthquakes (due to some unknown phenomenon?)

Well there’s a 15 day delay between them so, I think it’s be harder to have the opposite :D

The article mentions that a thing could change the core magnetic stuff, which deflects cosmic rays, and triggers other changes that in two weeks percolate up to an earthquake. This is a statistical finding, needs a theory to explain. I mean it could be some weird trajectories in a chaotic fluid flow of liquid iron in the core that causes both.

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#48

Post by colechristensen »

idlewords wrote: post #6

The key claim in the paper ( 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 the…

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.

Re: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

#50

Post by jjk166 »

ozgung wrote: post #15
athenot wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not control but the ability to have an advance warning would be a huge gain in terms of public safety.

“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.

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.
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