Large storms may be strong enough to prompt tremors

by
in science on (#2T53)
Feels Like Earthquake Weather...

Hurricane Irene, a powerful storm that ran north along the US East Coast four days after a magnitude-5.8 earthquake rattled Virginia in 2011, may have triggered some of that earthquake's aftershocks. The rate of aftershocks following the 23 August 2011, earthquake near Mineral, Virginia, increased sharply as Irene passed by.

The researchers are not the first to examine a potential link between hurricanes and seismic activity. Shimon Wdowinski, a seismologist at the University of Miami, Florida, says that he has found a strong correlation between extremely wet tropical cyclones striking Taiwan and big earthquakes that occur up to three years later. He thinks that the erosion of landslide debris in such a storm's aftermath triggers a change in fault loading, eventually producing an earthquake.

That work is not yet published. But another study by researchers in the United States and Taiwan found a similar association between slow earthquakes - which take places over hours or even days - and tropical cyclones in Taiwan.

http://www.nature.com/news/hurricane-may-have-triggered-earthquake-aftershocks-1.12839
Reply 3 comments

It is bad style to say: Not surprising (Score: 1)

by tanuki64@pipedot.org on 2014-10-06 21:57 (#2T58)

But: Not surprising. Large hurricanes generate and can be identified through their seismic signals.
If they can, why shouldn't they be able to trigger an earthquake? Before an earthquake there is pressure. Not sure if one can say that the system is in a meta stable state. For many meta stable systems very little energy is needed to trigger the boom. When a hurricane really registers on a seismograph, its energy is cannot be that little.

Why bad style? Even if it makes perfectly sense, it has to be researched and quantified. Just saying: 'Not surprising' is definitely not enough. :-)

Re: It is bad style to say: Not surprising (Score: 2, Interesting)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-07 02:29 (#2T5H)

The age-old problem is: Many things which "make perfect sense" happen to be completely wrong. It's only after-the-fact that we can sit back and say how obvious something is, and ignore the other stuff that seemed obvious, but was found to be incorrect.

"Earthquake weather" has been dismissed by scientists repeatedly. And the story right above this one is that telegony, roundly denounced by prevailing scientific wisdom for over a century, may actually be true. I certainly wasn't trying for a theme by submitting these two stories close together, but that's how it worked out...