From the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science , an interesting groundbreaking paper, ahem…but, wait for it, we’ll soon hear “Climate disruption causes more hurricanes and those cause more earthquakes” from the Rommists and McKibbenites.
Research study shows link between earthquakes and tropical cyclones
New study may help scientists identify regions at high risk for earthquakes
SAN FRANCISCO – Dec. 8, 2011 – A groundbreaking study led by University of Miami (UM) scientist Shimon Wdowinski shows that earthquakes, including the recent 2010 temblors in Haiti and Taiwan, may be triggered by tropical cyclones (hurricanes and typhoons). Wdowinski will discuss his findings during a presentation at the 2011 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
“Very wet rain events are the trigger,” said Wdowinski, associate research professor of marine geology and geophysics at the UM Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “The heavy rain induces thousands of landslides and severe erosion, which removes ground material from the Earth’s surface, releasing the stress load and encouraging movement along faults.”
Wdowinski and a colleague from Florida International University analyzed data from quakes magnitude-6 and above in Taiwan and Haiti and found a strong temporal relationship between the two natural hazards, where large earthquakes occurred within four years after a very wet tropical cyclone season.
During the last 50 years three very wet tropical cyclone events – Typhoons Morakot, Herb and Flossie – were followed within four years by major earthquakes in Taiwan’s mountainous regions. The 2009 Morakot typhoon was followed by a M-6.2 in 2009 and M-6.4 in 2010. The 1996 Typhoon Herb was followed by M-6.2 in 1998 and M-7.6 in 1999 and the 1969 Typhoon Flossie was followed by a M-6.2 in 1972.
The 2010 M-7 earthquake in Haiti occurred in the mountainous region one-and-a-half years after two hurricanes and two tropical storms drenched the island nation within 25 days.
The researchers suggest that rain-induced landslides and excess rain carries eroded material downstream. As a result the surface load above the fault is lessened.
“The reduced load unclamp the faults, which can promote an earthquake,” said Wdowinski.
Fractures in Earth’s bedrock from the movement of tectonic plates, known as faults, build up stress as they attempt to slide past each other, periodically releasing the stress in the form of an earthquake.
According to the scientists, this earthquake-triggering mechanism is only viable on inclined faults, where the rupture by these faults has a significant vertical movement.
Wdowinski also shows a trend in the tropical cyclone-earthquake pattern exists in M-5 and above earthquakes. The researchers plan to analyze patterns in other seismically active mountainous regions – such as the Philippines and Japan – that are subjected to tropical cyclones activity.
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What they are saying is that erosion impacts the timing of earthquakes in certain circumstances.
Changes in erosion rates are primarily caused by local land use changes, so their comments are not relevant to global climate change but rather to local agricultural practices.
If their theory is sound, it seem likely that erosion-induced earthquakes could be a good thing. If erosion results in an early release of earthquake energy, it could prevent a larger earthquake from happening later.
That’s why I do not flush anymore… /sarc
If this is true, isn’t it a good thing to de-stress fault lines before catastrophic levels are reached and a killer earthquake results?? But then, what do I know? GK
It is clear to me that the only way to prevent earthquakes for those who live in a tropical cyclone danger zone is to purchase a sheep’s bladder. This new learning is truly amazing
“In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself by two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore… in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long… seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long… There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of fact.”
Mark Twain
JuergenK says:
December 9, 2011 at 3:14 am
@Allan M
Maybe you could separate dihydrogeniummonoxid from oxygeniumdihydrid to get rid of the wettness and the weight?
Only if I can get a very big research grant.
Vote:
1. BS
2. Nonsense
3. Idiocy
4. Stupidty
5. Lack of BASIC PHYSICS understanding (I.e., weight of water from “Cyclone” = FRACTION of weight of first meter of soil/rock…)
6. Correlation is NOT causation!
7. “Cancer Clusters” for Grade Schools…statistical fluke, meaningless as this garbage is!
8. Accept it unquestioningly, as it supports the “mime”.
Max 🙂
For a quick cross check of the validity of this study take a look at Jan Null’s excellent rainfall chart for San Francisco, http://ggweather.com/sf/sf_seasonal_rainfall.jpg, starting in 1849. San Francisco’s most famous earthquake in 1906 was preceded in eight out of the ten previous years with below average rainfall. By the ‘logic’ of this study the biggest quakes should have happened in the 1862-1865 window or the 1998-2001 window, following extremely wet winters. Only two quakes would meet the 6.0 qualification standard for the whole state for the 1862 window and zero quakes for the 1998 window. However Coalinga, in the center of the state, suffered through 6.5 and 5.7 quakes two months apart in 1983. Interestingly these quakes fall in the four year window following one of the worst droughts in California history. Oh yes…and Coalinga averages a whopping 7.8 inches of rain per year. (See http://designbuildprogram.com/uploads/B10_-_Urban_Water_Management.pdf for rainfall summary.)
crosspatch says:
December 8, 2011 at 9:14 pm
Sorry, I just don’t buy it. I don’t believe the “surface load” of even a couple of hundred feet of soil has any relative impact so several miles of rock. What I might find more believable is the percolation of water into fault acting as a lubricant. But that only works in areas that are normally arid…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
They did not bother to do a literature search. The connection seems to be between the sun/ planetary alignments and sunspots to both weather and earthquakes and not a direct connection.
Relationship between global seismicity and solar activities by Gui-Qing Zhang
http://www.springerlink.com/content/buvw2tq081013210/
263
J. Ind. Geophys. Union ( October 2005 )
Vol.9, No.4, pp.263-276
Planetary Configuration: Implications for EarthquakePrediction and Occurrence in Southern Peninsular India
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28560923/Earthquake-Planets-2
“The heavy rain induces thousands of landslides and severe erosion, which removes ground material from the Earth’s surface, releasing the stress load and encouraging movement along faults.”
Let’s examine this hypothesis in light of the facts:
Landslides and erosion cannot and do not “remove ground material from the Earth’s surface”. Landslide material is deposited immediately adjacent to the slide, and eroded sediments are re-deposited on nearby deltas. With the exception of minor mineral dissolution, virtually no material is lost. Additionally, the material is almost always deposited nearby on the same tectonic plate. Landslides and erosion gradually transfer mass from mountains to the coast.
The islands devastated by these earthquakes are products of the earthquakes themselves. The cited earthquakes occur along plate boundaries in subduction zones or mega strike-slip faults. The Haiti earthquake was 8 km (5 miles) deep, the Taiwan earthquake was 12 km (7 miles) deep, and the Japan earthquake was 30 km (18.6 miles) deep. These earthquakes were produced by compressional forces generated even deeper (in the upper mantle) at depths of more than 70 km (10 miles). The process of tectonic plates grinding past one another created the islands of Haiti, Taiwan and Japan.
In addition to being miles below the surface, the foci (the point of crustal rupture) for most of these earthquakes is often well away from these islands (and the areas of erosion and redeposition). It is unlikely that the gradual redistribution of relatively small piles of dirt that accumulate on the edges of tectonic plates grinding past one another could trigger the plates themselves to move.
For earthquakes that occur along compressional plate boundaries, the proposed mechanism is: “landslides and erosion from heavy rains move enough material to release enough stress on the tectonic plates to cause them to move”. This is not even comparable to the tail wagging the dog. It’s not even comparable to the hair on the butt of the flea on the tail of the elephant wagging the elephant. Rain falling on land pushed up by tectonic forces in the Earth’s upper mantle can no more produce earthquakes miles below the surface than gnat farts can kill blue whales.
as another geologist and geoengineer – I call it BS.
as someone has mentioned above, there is an issue of scale to be considered! Traditionally, from what I recall of my student days, earthquakes tended to cause land and mudslides, not the other way round!
was this published just to scrape the barrel and ‘help’ Durban?
100% Pure BS (TM). Heavy rains always cause tectonic movement of underwater oceanic faults, no? Who let these loons out of the padded cell?
From their website:
http://sites.agu.org/fallmeeting/
“As the world’s largest gathering of Earth and space scientists comes to a close, one thing is clear – AGU’s Fall Meeting gets bigger and better every year. With more than 20,000 attendees, 12,000 poster presentations, 6,000 oral presentations, 250 exhibitors, and many workshops, town halls, and social and networking events, there has been something for everyone’.
Dates: 12/5 to 12/9 (today is last day)
Wow! 12,000 poster presentations, 6,000 oral presentations! Maybe someone who is an AGU member can tells us if the oral presentations are the result of a peer-reviewed written paper, or just “oral only.” A quick look at the program indicates that there is lots more fodder for discussion than just this one paper.
The press release for the presentation above doesn’t say it was a peer-reviewed paper. I too am skeptical. I’m not sure about Taiwan, but I’ll bet that Haiti is hit with very heavy rain events at least every 4 years, so it should be possible to correlate any recurring event to some heavy rain event within the last four years.
Of course all these questions lead to the inevitable “ More research is needed” -i.e. send more money.
Denver experienced a number of minor earthquakes in the early 1960’s. The cause was finally determined to be water being injected into the rocks from the Rocky Flats Plutonium processing center near Boulder. The water, waste from the processing plant, was injected several thousand feet down through deep wells, under very high pressure. While the mechanism suggested in the article is possible, I think plate tectonics, shear zones, and deep stress are far more involved. This study reminds me far too much of the link between CO2 and global temperatures – the relation between correlation and causation are equally weak.
I’m surprised at you skeptics, questioning this soon-to-be settled science!
Don’t you remember how we stopped global warming back in 2006 ??!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Jump_Day
(ΛΩΛ)
If this work got through “peer review” then it puts the final nail in the coffin of the peer review process.
The idiots should have spent sometime in area when earthquakes occur and gone out and talk to the locals instead of playing with computers and embarassing themselves.
Pass this on to Steve McIntyre for some real statistics. Having heavy rains effect earthquakes 4 or 5 years later? The spatial sampling is suspect here. Did the big earthquakes in recent years in Peru, Iran, Chile follow major heavy rain events? Are we blaming the recent disasterous Japan earthquake on heavy rain events? Are all the earthquakes that didn’t seem to have a deluge associated with them removed from the list? Are we giving priority to the occurrence of rain events over earthquake events (to get rid of earthquakes away from rain events)? The moon gives a pretty good tug twice a day- is the erosion a bigger event?
@Gail Combs says:
December 9, 2011 at 12:11 pm
“Gui-Qing Zhang: and the relation between earthquake and solar proton events is closer than others.”
High density rather than high energy proton bursts, I would agree with that. And very often there is a coronal hole directly Earth facing.
And rain is caused by global warming, which is caused by humans, so humans are the cause for earthquaqes. Right. Look, I see an invisinble pink unicorn flying…
Numerology, the best religion in the world. Given enough patience and facts, all sorts of matching can be done. I guess one could find a correlation between some behaviour of ants and earthquaqes, too.
wow
Someone never took a geology class. Hispaniola and Taiwan are islands last time I checked. When big storms approach the ocean swells. Hmmm billion to some power of tonnes of storm surge water (read MORE pressure) are dwarfed by a few landslides. I see. Who were the peer reviewers on this?
Despite what those who are nay-saying think there is actually evidence that tropical storms have an effect upon earthquakes. At the start of the hurricane season there is usually a rash of mag 5 earthquakes on the Reykjanes ridge and which they do happen from time to time the incidence is higher and more grouped when a large depression approaches.
A small change in atmospheric pressure can cause a difference of millions of tons of air over an area. This is something I have also noticed in Yellowstone National Park as well. While I don’t think landslides have anything to do with it air pressure definitely does. I am still studying this and I won’t be publishing a paper as I am not a scientist, just an interested amateur, but it is my believe tat they have come across what I am seeing but attributed it to the wrong reasons.
When Mt. St. Helens was active, it seemed that many of the minor eruptions occurred just after a local Puget Sound high tide–perhaps do to maximum magma pressure on the plugged vents.
Everybody seems to have missed the most obvious correlation, no women’s studies programs in either Haiti or Taiwan.
I think this study will not hold up under scrutiny.
PuterMan says:
December 10, 2011 at 2:53 am
“”A small change in atmospheric pressure can cause a difference of millions of tons of air over an area. “”
Peter, I live in Sydney, Australia. After reading your hypothesis I took scales out into my front yard. I just could not find any of that millions of tons of air. Could you please point me in the direction of a instrument that weighs air.