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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

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maxerickson·

The flooding in Houston did that, albeit 2 centimeters.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/hurri...

(I'm not suggesting a link between the flooding and the quake. It would be fascinating if there were a link though)

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Continents are basically rafts of granite. Like any raft, if you put more stuff on it, it sinks a bit.

Thank you for that comment. I've been taught that Northern Europe was depressed by the weight of the ice sheets during the Ice Age and is still rebounding now that the ice sheets have gone and the weight is off.

I was imagining this as like compressing a sponge and never quite believed that re-expanding would take thousands of years.

But an enormous raft of granite, floating on an extremely viscous sea of even denser hot rock? At least I can see clearly that I have no useful intuitions about this. Does the raft bob up and down on a ten thousand year time scale? (Probably too heavily damped to oscillate) But the raft metaphor implies some lateral flow of the "sea" as the raft rises, so that is something to think about.

I don't see it. It's not even the same plate. You'd need the North American Plate to distort from Houston (definitely happened, but as you said, 2 cm). You'd need that to make the edges of the North American Plate move (maybe, but how much?). You'd need that to shove on the edge of the Cocos Plate in a way that adds to the stress in the center of the plate rather than on the edge.

I'm not a geologist, but as I said, I don't see it.

Right. I don't see it either, I wrote that stuff to try to clarify that I was responding to the question about what might bend a plate, that I wasn't trying to tie the events together.

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