Just to clarify. The source of the energy of this earth quake was not man-made. It was pre-existing gravitational potential energy.
Similarly, a low-energy scream in the montain can trigger a high-energy avalanche.
Similarly, a low-energy scream in the montain can trigger a high-energy avalanche.
While this is a popular myth, it's actually entirely false. You can shout and scream all you want - there's not enough energy transmitted to the snowpack to actually trigger an avalanche (by at least two orders of magnitude). This has been debunked by multiple studies, one example here: http://www.gblanc.fr/IMG/pdf/reuter2009.pdf
It is like heating a pot of water to 100c. It is about to boil. Shout at it and it will start to boil a picosecond faster than if you didnt shout at it. Be really careful with the temperature and maybe your shouting makes it boil when otherwise it never would.
Back country snowboarding is a great example where small avalanches are much more common even if most of them don’t become significant. But, because the many small avalanches happen close together they are much more likely to grow. This is also why sound is more effective than you would expect, getting a huge number of tiny avalanches to happen at the same time makes it significantly more likely to form a large one.
Sources: personal experience in AIARE training [0] and Utah Avalanche Center via Myth Busters [1]
[0] https://avtraining.org/ [1] http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-da...
Then how do they happen naturally?
The goal of the bomb is to thump the snow hard enough that if any weak layers of snow exist below a hard slab of solid snow, the slab will crack, slamming air through the weak layer, breaking the support of the rest of the slab and causing a slide.
Naturally occurring avalanches usually need some obvious change of force on the snowpack, or some reason why a weak layer becomes weaker. I'd guess that a sonic boom, or definitely a scream, couldn't do enough in almost any situation to tip the balance.
That's why the efficiency of the power plant (if this energy would have been captured) would have been a sight to see on paper. The energy they put into the fracking would have been tiny compared to this.
edit: spelling
He did imply it would likely not be possible. He said that if it could be captured, it would be an absolutely mind-boggling ROI in terms of energy in vs energy out.
However, think of the sheer amount of potential energy cause by plate tectonics... we're talking about continents... moving.
Also, just like after that scream, there is no avalanche risk, since all the snow slid down the valley, there should now be no quake risk for quite a while at that site.