Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I came across an article with a provocative headline, “Scientists Link Cosmic Radiation to Earthquakes for the First Time“.
So I went to look at the underlying study, Observation of large scale precursor correlations between cosmic rays and earthquakes with a periodicity similar to the solar cycle by P. Homola and 43 others.
Hmmm, sez I. Willis’s Rule of Authors says that the strength of a scientific study is inversely proportional to the number of authors … but I digress. The Abstract says:
The search for correlations between secondary cosmic ray detection rates and seismic effects has long been a subject of investigation motivated by the hope of identifying a new precursor type that could feed a global early warning system against earthquakes.
Here we show for the first time that the average variation of the cosmic ray detection rates correlates with the global seismic activity to be observed with a time lag of approximately two weeks, and that the significance of the effect varies with a periodicity resembling the undecenal solar cycle, with a shift in phase of around three years, exceeding 6 σ at local maxima.
The precursor characteristics of the observed correlations point to a pioneer perspective of an early warning system against earthquakes.
The study says:
Here we report on an observation of the correlations between variation of the average rates of secondary cosmic ray fluxes measured locally and global seismic activity, and we also point to the periodicity of these correlations (or their observability) which corresponds to sunspot number observations back to the 1960s.
They describe their method as:
… an alternative, novel approach on which we report here: comparing the absolute average variabilities of secondary cosmic radiation to the average global sum of earthquake magnitudes.
And their conclusion was:
We have demonstrated for the first time that the variation of the absolute average detection rates of secondary cosmic radiation correlates with the global seismic situation (sum of the magnitudes of earthquakes with magnitudes greater-than or equal to 4, occurring at all locations) that takes place approximately two weeks later than the relevant cosmic ray data. The size of the shift in time between the cosmic and seismic data sets reveals the precursor character of the correlation effect.
So to see if this made sense, I went and got the data for earthquakes, cosmic rays, and sunspots. You can’t do a CEEMD or a Fourier analysis unless the data is regularly spaced in time or space, which earthquake data isn’t. So I used a variation of Fourier analysis that I invented a few years back, only to find out that I wasn’t the first to invent it. Tamino informed me that “The method you describe is very clever. It’s also known (in the astronomical literature at least) as the Date-Compensated Discrete Fourier Transform, or DCDFT (Ferraz-Mello, S. 1981, Astron. J., 86, 619).” Fair enough, it proves that I understand Fourier transforms … the main advantage of the method is that it doesn’t require that the data be regularly spaced.
My logic was that if the magnitudes of earthquakes are related to sunspots and cosmic rays as the 44 authors claim, we should see some kind of a significant ~11-year cycle in the earthquake data. Here’s the result of my analysis.
Figure 1. Fourier Periodograms of monthly sunspots, earthquake average magnitudes, and cosmic rays. The three longest records of cosmic rays are from Thule, Greenland; Jungfraujoch, Switzerland; and Newark, NJ USA. In addition to the earthquakes of magnitude greater than 4 studied by the authors, I also looked at earthquakes of magnitude greater than 7.
From the periodogram, it’s obvious that there are no significant cycles in earthquakes at around 11 years. You can see that the cosmic rays are closely connected to sunspots, for well-understood physical reasons.
But there’s no such connection between sunspots or cosmic rays and earthquakes.
Does this complete lack of any significant ~11-year cycles in earthquakes show that the 44 authors are wrong?
Nope. Maybe they have discovered the secret sauce for connecting cosmic rays and earthquakes.
But it sure makes a conventional explanation of their claim much less likely …
My very best wishes to you all,
w.
PS: Yeah, you’ve heard it before, you’ll hear it again. To cut down the number of misunderstandings, when you comment PLEASE quote the exact words you are discussing.
Honestly, Willis, you could have stopped at “I smell bullshit”
Or, to make it sound more scientific, he could have written “I forensically detect a significant olfactory response to volatile organic compounds associated with male bovine excreta.”
Or what you said, which is the language that groups of 43 scientists actually use with each other when they aren’t writing bullshit papers to justify their grant-mongering.
Or I Fuked-your-Shima.
Cosmic Rays…
Cause Earthquakes…
Riiiiight!
A new breakthrough study determined that Living causes Death.
World ends at 10, film at 11!
The authors don’t say cosmic rays cause earthquakes, but that secondary CR flux is correlated with total global seismic magnitude, with a lag.
Their proposed method of action is geomagnetic variation in Earth’s liquid core.
If a team of geologists said that- I might believe them, but not a team of physicists.
They need a phizzik
From 1985:
Strong earthquakes, novae and cosmic ray environmentHide affiliations
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985ICRC….5..529Y/abstract
What is it Willis always says about copying the exact text you are commenting on?
The headline doesn’t say caused, it says linked.
And the secondary CR flux is directly linked to cosmic rays. IE, cosmic rays cause the secondary CR flux.
The title of the post is “Do Cosmic Rays Cause Earthquakes?”.
True. I should have been a bit more cautious in my wording.
However, whether it is a cause or a “precursor”, it should show an 11-year cycle.
It doesn’t.
I fixed the title.
w.
Do cosmic rays precede earthquakes? Yep
Do cosmic rays precede child birth? Yep
Do cosmic rays precede cancer diagnosis? Yep
Do cosmic rays precede flatulence? Yep
Do earthquakes precede cosmic rays? Also Yep
Does child birth precede cosmic rays? Also Yep
But earthquakes often precedes child birth !
~ 9 mths after ‘the earth moved’.
So what is the postulated mechanism, not just correlation, between cosmic ray flux and geomagnetic variation in the earth’s core (the inner core is actually solid iron, not liquid – the outer core is thought to be a highly viscous fluid)? And what is the postulated mechanism between geomagnetic variation and plate tectonics? Because all earthquakes are the result of plate tectonics.
The motive force in plate tectonics is convective flow within the semi-solid mantle. The mantle is heated to a state of plasticity by radioactive decay of the several radioactive Iron isotopes within the inner and outer core.
Cosmic rays penetrate only 3.2 km into the earth, so they cannot create any direct effects on the earth’s core, the outer layer of which is at a depth of 2,900 km from the earth’s surface.
If you don’t want to read the whole paper, here’s a report on it:
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-intriguing-earthquakes-cosmic.html
I think most earthquakes are deeper than 3.2 km, so the cosmic rays can even act as some kind of tectonic lubricant. If there was a correlation I’d entertain the idea or at least a viable mechanism – because it’s possible that the cosmic rays have to hit a vulnerable spot exactly which might not happen every time there is a peak – but there’s neither.
Really shows that scientific journals will print anything and peer review is a joke.
That deep would be neutrinos of this I am fermion
True. I should have been a bit more cautious in my wording.
However, whether it is a cause or a “precursor”, it should show an 11-year cycle.
It doesn’t.
w.
Maybe the cosmic rays only affect the earthquake faults that don’t have on a tinfoil hat? I know mine keeps me safe.
I see a definite uptick just after the sunspot cycle minimises again, ca. 22a.
Sunspot cycle = planetary alignment cycle = (oh gasp, ye gads!) electromagnetic alignments => electric universe…
Figure 1 says it all.
The nmdb.eu info is minimalist, does “cosmic rays” include both proton and neutron fluxes?
Thanks, Willis. I admire your willingness to challenge suspect claims with authentic scholarship. Looking forward for your next post.
Since earthquakes are virtually 100% a result of plate tectonics, the movement of plates that make up the earth’s crust, and the pressures that build within the plates as they are in relative motion with each other, it is hard to theorize any mechanism associated with cosmic rays that could affect plate tectonics.
A very old ism is that correlation is not causation. There are an infinite number of potential correlations possible between pairs of data sets … such as the number of firefly matings in leap years with corresponding earthquake frequency, producing very low but non zero correlation coefficients, that are of course completely meaningless and irrelevant.
This study sounds like one of them.
Remember not too long ago, there were claims by similar scientists to these ones that global warming caused more earthquakes. Their logic was almost as bad as here.
Tsunamis too.
But the one about globull warming causing people to go crazy was almost certainly correct.
Not 100%. Earthquakes are also caused by magma moving up, down and all around. Fracking can cause them.
Vertical magma movements ARE the result of plate techtonics. Plates running into each other create subduction zones that force magma upward through stress induced cracks .. or when plates are moving away from each other in rift zones that thin out the crust. Plates that move over “hot spots” also are the result of plate tectonics. ALL earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are the result of plate tectonics.
There are also intraplate faults, like the New Madrid, MO seismic zone.
Nice quick analysis, WE.
I was curious about this preposterous paper’s postulated predictive mechanism. It is laid out in the introduction. ‘Anticipatory shifts in gravitational mass and geomagnetic force’. Right there in the initial intro sentences they spout nonsense. Earthquakes occur when stress and strain on a fault overcome its locking friction. Only at the moment of the slippage itself could there ever be any shift in internal mass maybe also causing a slight shift in planetary geomagnetic force.
Worse, the geomagnetic force thing would be easy to test. Were there any changes in geomagnetic force directly associated with earthquakes? If not, then there could NEVER be any prior ‘anticipatory shifts’. I did some looking around and didn’t find anything at all. As expected. It is a big rotating planet and it’s geomagnetic force has mainly to do with currents in the molten part of it’s iron core, NOT the thin solid outer rock crust where all earthquakes occur.
How did this ever pass peer review? It doesn’t even pass high school geology common sense! (At my public high school, the AP science courses were geology 9th, biology 10th, chemistry 11th, and physics 12th grades.)
The premise comes from Hollywood. Specifically the 2009 movie “2012“.
For an understanding of where that movie got its inspiration from, the credits include this line:
You need to go a bit deeper than Graham Hancock. There is actually an interesting story. Einstein played a role.
Good point Rus.
Just wondering what could affect the planet’s geomagnetism force,if anything.
Some of Svensmark’s research into the paleo record suggests a correlation between cosmic rays, geomagnetic field variation and cloud cover.
Well some of that is the orientation onnthe galaxy plane, over many millions of years. So definitely not climate.
I’ve looked for any evidence of cosmic rays affecting clouds, without joy.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/01/splicing-clouds/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/28/why-ireland-is-green/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/09/cosmic-disconnections/
w.
Thanks for the replies. appears that there is no Million/Billion year version of Weather which could be called over some longer period. And rightfully so.
How do you define something which appears as a gravity affected clock?
Due to global warming I sweat a lot more – consequently causing my guitar strings to gunk up a lot faster.
I really hate changing strings…
Have you tried superstrings? That may help you unify things.
Ernie Ball
But do your gunked up guitar strings affect cosmic rays? I suggest you ask for a grant to do some research!
When I read this my brain told me you swear a lot more.
I got it right at second glance.
I’ve never been diagnosed with Tourettes.
But, with Zero Carbon and Zero Covid I have to admit to cussing more.
Is that another effect of Glowbull Warming, I wonder?
These 44(?) scientists must also believe, as I do, that manned missions to Mars are simply deadly and futile endeavors. While the Titan fought high pressures, among a myriad of complex death defying concerns, manned missions to Mars will have to fight both Cosmic and Solar Radiation for 3 years – a problem the relevant engineers fully understand, I would hope. With this study, I take it that the Martian Astronauts will also have to deal with Cosmically Induced Marquakes for the 20 month period between trips to/from Mars/Earth.
Mars has an immobile solid core, hence no magnetic field like Earth’s. Also, its crust is in one immobile piece, lacking plate tectonics.
Nonetheless: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-insight-detects-two-sizable-quakes-on-mars
Yes, there are Marsquakes, but they would not correlate with CRs, since the authors’ alleged mechanism doesn’t exist there.
I think you’re right Milo. I should have added a /sarc at the end of my first submission, making this whole dialog unnecessary. Sorry about that. I was going with Willis poo-pooing the CR/Earthquake relationship by projecting it on to Mars as well.
One of the recent probes included a seismometer, and it has succeeded in measuring marsquakes. Scientists believe that they are caused shifting as Mars cools and shrinks.
“While the Titan fought high pressures, among a myriad of complex death defying concerns, manned missions to Mars will have to fight both Cosmic and Solar Radiation for 3 years”
A coating of water ice about one meter thick on a vehicle traveling between the Earth and Mars would be sufficient to protect Mars-bound astronauts from cosmic rays and solar radiation.
Tom, I agree. I’ve seen your posts, you’re smart – I know you know all of the following… just reminding. According to text from a website: “Costs have come down significantly since the rise of SpaceX. The Falcon 9 rocket, for example, can lift a payload to the ISS for $1,233 per pound mainly due to the craft’s recoverability and reusability. Elon Musk has indicated SpaceX’s target is to reduce payload delivery costs to $500 per pound.” (Clay – I cannot vouch for the veracity of the quote source). Hundreds of Cubic Meters of water would cost much dinero. And this only speaks to protection from radiation. Sending Human-life sustaining living quarters into space and landed on Mars is unpresidented and very death defying and costly.
My belief is that Mars Astronauts will die because: Murphy’s Law. The highly touted AI and amazing robotics of today would be so much cheaper, and we won’t need to name Elementary Schools after dead Mars astronauts. Spock: “Captain, it is illogical to send humans to Mars. 21th Century Earthlings made the huge mistake of confusing the romanticism of Space Exploration Movies, and the fact that Space is extremely hostile to humans. Dying horrible deaths is not at all romantic”.
“Willis’s Rule of Authors says that the strength of a scientific study is inversely proportional to the number of authors”
I can only wonder how many are geologists. A quick look at the list of authors- doesn’t appear that any are geologists.
A correlation between cosmic rays and earthquakes? Seems nuts. What could possibly be the mechanism? I’m no scientist, but this “science” seems far crazier than the “climate emergency”- at least for that, there is a hypothetical, if false, causation.
The authors’ proposed mechanism is geomagnetism in Earth’s liquid core. They’re mostly particle and astrophysicists.
cosmic rays can’t make it through the atmosphere without crashing into something.
I don’t see how any of the secondary particles would be able to make it all the way to the core.
Even if they did, the amount of energy left in the ones that make it that far would be tiny. Far too little to have a measurable impact on geo-magnetism.
Even if there was a measurable impact, I don’t see a mechanism for geo-magnetism to affect earthquakes.
The authors elucidate their hypothesis in the paper.
CRs create other particles, such as muons, during atomic collisions in the atmosphere, some of which do reach Earth’s surface. Neutrinos usually pass straight through the planet.
One of the places where CR effects are studied is in Argentina. It’s in the paper. Another is in Utah. Neutrinos are observed in Antarctic ice.
In lieu of the whole paper:
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-intriguing-earthquakes-cosmic.html
Cosmic rays, even the most energetic, penetrate no more than 3.2 km of the crust, never making into the mantle let alone to the outer core.
CRs include neutrinos, most of which pass right through Earth without hitting any atoms.
Muons penetrate into deep mines, so your figure might apply to them.
They probably have the implied cause and effect backwards. Geomagnetism controls how many CRs make it to Earth. It may take a couple of weeks for whatever is responsible for changes in the geomagnetic field to propagate to the crust, resulting in earthquakes.
That makes a lot of sense – so CR strength would just be a symptom of deep seismic activity that later results in an earthquake. But still no peak in earthquakes during the peak in CR – in fact it looks lower than normal, however there is a tiny peak at double the sunspot period.
The full solar magnetic cycle is ~22-years. There is a double sunspot peak.
If you look at the page given as the source for the cosmic ray data, it has checkboxes for 52 different monitoring stations. It is customary when using someone else’s data in your own paper to have them as an author, unless they don’t want to be included, even if they don’t contribute any actual writing.
I’m guessing this is why the paper has so many authors.
Really? I wouldn’t know as I’m not a scientist or published author. But it doesn’t make sense. Just using others’ data you need to add them to your paper? Why not just give them as references. All those who do the work of writing the paper should be listed of course. It seems to me its just a way of making the paper seem more important with more names- though if I wrote such a paper I wouldn’t want to add anyone who didn’t contribute to the writing- other than as references. But as I said, I’m not part of that world- but if anyone else has an opinion, I’d like to hear it.
If I wrote a paper like this one, I certainly wouldn’t use my real name…
If you look at the end of the paper you will usually see the roles of the various contributors listed, in this case:
Author contributionsConceptualization: PH, VM, AN, DAC, JZS, JWM, NB; Methodology: PH, VM, AN; Resources: PH, MK, BI; Investigation: PH, VM, AN, RD, RG, SS, OR, OSk, KD, MK, OSu, KG; Visualization: PH, SS, MK; Project administration: PHSupervision: PH, JWM, DAC; Writing – original draft: PH, VM, AN, JZS; Writing – review & editing: PH, DAC, SS, JZS, JMV, TW, NZ, KAC, BI, TB, GB, NB, RK, MVM, KK, OB, ŁB, MB, MDRF, MF, PK, BŁ, JM, MN, LP, MP, KR, KS, TS, JS, AAT.
Would the eruptive events that gave us the Siberian Traps (~252 m ybp), the Deccan Traps (~65 m ybp), and the Columbia River Basalt (6 million to 17 m ybp) flows be considered “earthquakes” in the context of the Homola+43 paper?
These events are believed to have occurred episodically over millions of years. Was it cosmic rays the done it?
Volcanic eruptions aren’t the same as earthquakes, whether flood basalts or Andesitic.
The Siberian Traps were probably due to a mantle plume. The Deccan Traps and Columbia basalts owe to plate passage over hot spots, ie the Reunion Island and Yellowstone.
See my post “Volcanoes and Sunspots“.
w.
Thanks Willis, always a pleasure to read your articles.
While the study wasn’t enlightening, I did learn a new word, “undecanal” (not undecenal as in the study). Couldn’t find it used for solar cycles, just chemistry:
“Undecanal, also known as undecyl aldehyde, is an organic compound with the chemical formula C10H21CHO. It is an eleven-carbon aldehyde.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecanal
The search also led me here:
How mosquito brains encode human odor so they can seek us outhttps://www.princeton.edu/news/2022/05/04/how-mosquito-brains-encode-human-odor-so-they-can-seek-us-out
And only 12 authors!
The authors use the term to mean 11 years. The aldehyde has 11 carbon atoms.
Thanks Milo, I did understand that, just hadn’t seen it before.
As far as my search went, the word has only been used in chemistry. Undecennial would have been more appropriate – it was used back in 1858 to refer to the solar cycle:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/undecennial
English is not most authors’ native language.
I love their metric – “sum of the magnitudes of earthquakes with magnitudes greater-than or equal to 4, occurring at all locations”. The earthquake magnitude is a logarithm of energy. Why bother summing them?
Because it’s easier than doing the logarithmic math.
Who cares, in a paper fatally flawed from first geological principles?
Why bother summing them?
To multiply them. 🙂
This is starting to sound like the “Increased ice-cream sales cause more drownings” school of statistics…
Now… who’s sending those cosmic rays to cause earthquakes? Could it be hyper-advanced aliens or a god creating gamma-ray bursts to spite us? Maybe because of homosexuality? We should transmit back a middle-finger emoji in the direction of these cosmic rays.
In a few billion years when our reply reaches the aliens/god, they/it’ll know we aren’t to be messed with and stop causing earthquakes.
/sarcasm
The best paper about solar cycles and earthquakes I’ve seen correlates large earthquakes to the Solar Polar Magnetic Field. “Relationship Between M8+ Earthquake Occurrences and the Solar Polar Magnetic Fields.” from September of 2015.
The solar polar magnetic fields vary in lockstep with sunspots, so if their “Relationship” with quakes existed, the M8+ quakes should show an 11-year cycle.
Bad news.
w.
Surely there could be a 22 year peak, if such events were caused by a specific magnetic configuration of the sun.
I never realized how many earthquakes of 8 or more occurred in the last 100 years or so. Wow.
Latest Earthquakes (usgs.gov)
One wonders if there may be some subtle relationship with the Kp index and solar storm G scale and shakers?
NOAA Space Weather Scales | NOAA / NWS Space Weather Prediction Center
Gee. Maybe I can become famous and get a fat no-proofs-required grant if I gin up a documented study of being the first to “link” the periodicity of flushing my toilets to the global occurrence frequency and magnitude of unicorn farts, lagged by 3 months. I’m confident that I could get all the 60+ participants at my weekly team trivia contest as co-authors.
You need unicorns?
Joe Bastardi has said he was told by a seismologist that underwater seismic activity had increased significantly. Joe says this may partially explain ocean warming. Did the data you used include sib-sea vent or volcanic activity? Yeah, some tenuous stuff, but any evidence for or against? Warm magma may heat a lot of water.
Ocean warming is not really a thing – that’s why the climate scientists always quote the energy increase in the oceans instead of the temperature like they do the air- in spite of the fact that it is indeed temperature of the water that is measured by the automated bouys and the Argos. Since energy goes like T^4 it makes for much scarier numbers.
always
Large temperature drop in the stratosphere above 60S. Let’s see the size of the ozone hole in previous years. You can see that the temperature in the south was dropping by October.
We see a very long period of high cosmic radiation between cycles 24 and 25. If these periods are prolonged the impact of galactic radiation on the stratosphere at high latitudes will increase.
The 11-year cycle is not the most important solar cycle.
Solar polar fields(last text update: 2023.05.29)
Plain Language SummaryThe European Space Agency Swarm mission has been measuring the geomagnetic field since 2013. The geomagnetic field has a number of sources, from dynamo action in the Earth’s core to magnetospheric currents. We use data that have best estimates of all sources except the core removed, and they are reduced to a grid of points at satellite altitude every 4 months. The configuration of the trio of Swarm satellites enables spatial gradients of the field to be estimated, providing better resolution. We estimate the flow at the core surface from the time rate-of-change of these spatial gradients, assuming magnetic diffusion is negligible. Both vector and spatial gradient time rate-of-change data show rapid changes over the Pacific region in 2017, a phenomenon known as a geomagnetic jerk. Sharp flow changes, especially in the east-west component, are associated with the geomagnetic jerk. Flow acceleration is essentially steady before and after the jerk, changes rapidly at the jerk epoch, and is larger beneath the Pacific region than elsewhere on the core surface. Flow speeds are typically 20 km year−1, but we also see suggestions of rapidly (∼900 km year−1) westward-drifting acceleration features, adding to evidence for low latitude wave propagation in the core.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022GL098616
The operating satellites in low-Earth orbit give the rapid information transfer between the satellites and the Earth. At the same time, these satellites are continuously slowed down and affected by the dense atmosphere of the Earth, which is referred to as the atmospheric drag. This effect can be greater during space weather events such as geomagnetic storms. Over the past years, thousands of Starlink satellites have been deployed by the SpaceX company into low-Earth orbit. However, on 4th February, 38 Starlink satellites were destroyed before they were lifted to a higher Earth orbit, which brought an economic loss estimated to be several tens of millions of dollars. Geomagnetic indices indicated two successive geomagnetic storms, which could warm the upper atmosphere and increase the atmospheric drag. In this work, we provide a comprehensive review on the process of space weather during this event from the Sun all the way to the terrestrial atmosphere. We have illustrated the solar eruption, solar wind propagation, and atmospheric density enhancement, using both observed data and model simulations. This study calls for more accurate modeling and better understanding of space weather as well as collaborations between industry and space weather community.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022SW003152
We were careful to detect the anomalies during low geomagnetic activity, so those anomalies could be considered potentially as pre-seismic anomalies. Interesting enough, we find that a sigmoidal fit represents well the behavior of part or all anomalies toward the time of main earthquake occurrence: in particular, the sigmoid closer to the earthquake occurrence shows the inflection point about 1 month before the earthquake, supporting an underlying critical system pointing toward a critical point. Moreover, the electron density variations acknowledge the VTEC variations, better supporting the found results. Our finding shows that, for the present case study, the magnetic field component Y appears to be the most sensitive component to ionospheric anomalies with respect to X, Z, and total intensity but the least one with respect to the other analyzed ionospheric parameters.
Therefore, Swarm-TEC measurements could be used as one of the main data sources for studies on earthquake precursors, especially in combination with electron density and magnetic field in situ satellite observations. This reinforces the multi-precursors analysis, which remains the most favored approach to study the preparation phase of large earthquakes with non-seismic data.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022SW003152
FIGURE 8. Results of Swarm A electron density data analysis for the New Guinea earthquake (May 14, 2019) from January 01 to June 30, 2019 at night time. The symbols “P” and “S” indicate disturbed magnetic days (“P” according to magnetic indices, “S” according to solar parameters).
From this it follows that sudden spikes in periods low solar activity can be a precursor to strong earthquakes.
I thought everyone realised that it was burning fossil fuels in developed Western countries that caused earthquakes.
And flatulence.
And bad haircuts.
And faulty submarines.
And inflation.
And so, ad infinitum.