Live data from Hacker News

Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes

earth.com

231–240 of 246 posts

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

#237

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…

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…

While it's not encouraged in publish-or-perish contexts, you know, because money, but it is also a non-zero event that some of the quite important things in science have come to bear because of precisely this.

What's the old saying, "The best saying in science is not 'Eureka!', but rather 'Huh, that's weird...'"?

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

#238
The author's don't seem to recognize that is only very recently that we likely are cataloging most to all magnitude 5 earthquakes. They don't seem to recognize that the completeness of the catalog will be different in different places, the magnitudes may not even be calculated in the same way. For example, the increase in seismicity in the first plot is due to better detections, did they detrend this before doing their analysis? They really don't seem to know anything about how earthquake catalogs are created.

Then they create 5 day bins to correlate with the cosmic radiation. If an increase in cosmic radiation would cause an increase in seismicity "to not then 5 sigma" shouldn't it be most obvious in the cumulative count of radiation versus the cumulative count of earthquakes? Why would this only trigger larger magnitude events?

Also, since cosmic rays are the cause and the observations of them are global, wouldn't you see a global increase in seismicity? In fact, wouldn't this change in seismicity be long noted by seismologists even without knowing anything about cosmic rays?

They also seem to attribute mechanical stress of the crust to electromagnetic forces. Wouldn't you think someone would have noticed that their compass stopped working when an earthquake happens? Or aurora?

With such high correlations you would think it would be easier to just shift the cosmic data by 15 days and show how well it all goes together.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m afraid only the power of love and empathy and togetherness can resolve this climax

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.)

Same. The first season was enough for me. Never again.

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

#240
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Base 10 is certainly the default. Decibels are base 10; more specifically a Bel is 1 factor of 10, and a decibel is 1 tenth of that, ie 10^0.1.

fractional exponents don't work like that, for example x^½ is the square root of x. You probably meant 10^-1 !

No, 1 decibel is 10^1/10. Bels are multiplicative, not additive. You multiply 10^.1 by itself 10 times and you get 10^1. Similarly if you multiply x^1/2 by x^1/2 you get x.
Post reply on HN