Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes
earth.com
earth.com
One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind, just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal. I'd love to hear the opinion of someone who knows this field on the soundness of this research.
Ie, maybe able to generate the level of specificity required.
EDIT: Also there aren't that many places on earth at high risk of earthquake that also have poor construction, etc. Meaning any advance warning, that a significant quake may hit somewhere, can trigger "battening down the hatches".
Realistically, if you live in a place with poor construction and relatively large earthquake risk, the sensible thing is to always have your emergency kit ready to go. Chances are, you have other infrastructure issues anyway, so keeping a week or so of emergency rations and water available might come in handy more often than somewhere that has tigher building codes (and enforcement). It would likely be hard for everyone to prep within the same two week window anyway. But, if it was quite specific and accurate, relief organizations could begin staging and start traveling to be closer and quicker to respond.
Doesn't seem like it's anywhere close to that from descriptions in this thread.
[1] If you want to be fancy with probabilities, 64% of at least one earthquake. In some 17 days periods you will get no earthquake and in others you will get more than one earthquake. In average you will get one.
The 64% is still 64% because if N is big enough it almost doesn't depend if you consider something with a probability of 1/17 in 17 days or something with a probability of 1/21 in 21 days.
HAARP is a ~4 megawatt radio transmitter. That's it. It doesn't have mysterious unknown abilities to send energy deep underground.
That is high-watt transmission power may not be required. And further, it was suggested it's not done in isolation by HAARP but cooperatively with various transmitters also transmitting the same frequency at the same target - using standing waves.
It makes sense conceptually as an idea but I'm not sure there if there's any evidence of it?
Anyway... no there's no evidence. But i do miss these classic conspiracy theories! Anyone remember the X-Files episode featuring HAARP?
It all comes back to the mind rays.
We are hours away from coronal mass ejection catastrophe right now as solar cycle 20 builds in intensity. It seems reasonable to me that the complex relationship between the moon's gravitational pull and massive sun activity could affect our tiny little planet
It's possible for a falling leaf to hit a mountain in just such a way that it dislodges a boulder balanced on top, but you need to tell a pretty compelling story about why this sensitive arrangement came about. Similarly, you'd need to explain how gigatons of molten iron sloshing around deep underground might feel the kiss of the Sun in just such a way that it levels San Francisco (for example).
(i'm thinking of how decibels are a log scale sort of thing wrt power, where "orders of magnitude" used as a cliche probably does not mean what it would be read as.)
Something that scales geometrically might well have some giant constant so it isn’t useful until a specific performance regime.
> An order of magnitude is an approximation of the logarithm of a value relative to some contextually understood reference value, usually 10
I guess you could think of it like a _really_ low precision float or something.
For instance if the range is '3-13' in base 2 it's similar to '1-4' in base 10, but either way I'm making up numbers so who cares what the base is.
Yes, and that has always bothered me just a little bit, given that there is nothing intrinsically special about base 10 and yet the phrase seems to suggest something fundamental.
In other words, tectonic plates are nearly permanently in a state similar to a boulder delicately balanced on top of a mountain.
Throwing a cocked handgun into the dryer is different than a leaf falling on it.
Tectonic movements absolutely have the energy to move the earths magnetic field and the magnetic field blocks cosmic radiation. Something that moves the magnetic field would allow more cosmic radiation
There's only a handful of detectors outside of earths magnetic field. Orbiting satellites are even within its field of influence. Comparing this data to the measure of cosmic radiation from a deep space probe would be interesting to rule out that it's the earth movement increasing detected radiation and not the reverse
They may have simply discovered that tectonic movement changes how much cosmic radiation reaches our detectors.
There have been other studies that showed weird correlations to ionospheric activity and earthquakes, but only ever in retrospect.
Ps. An attempt at modeling the inner Earth's systems and flows might be more useful for earthquake prediction.
No, wiping out the entire electrical grid and all electronics
Because i can't read that as anything other than, we are in solar cycle 20, and it's currently building such that i predict with hours of right now, there will be a coronal mass ejection that will knock out the global power grid. But I've googled and we appear to currently be in solar cycle 25 with solar cycle 20 occurring in the 60s and 70s. Do you mean that a coronal mass ejection event takes hours to get to earth? Then why the "right now"? Does the delay of such events change on a sufficiently short time scale to warrant "right now"?
Nobody else seems confused so maybe I'm an idiot
Same goes for data that you had in the last but decided to ignore while building the model.
In both cases there is a legitimate risk of cheating.
The only data that you cannot cheat about is future data.
>One thing that troubles me in the paper is that the researchers appear to have gone looking for precursor patterns in an ad hoc way, with no physical theory in mind, just trying different binning techniques and delays until they got a signal.
There is nothing wrong with this. In fact this is how most science is done. This is pure experiment - try things and see what comes up.
You're conflating this step with step three of the general way things have traditionally been done in physics:
1. An experiment shows a previously unexplained phenomena.
2. A theory is made to explain the results and predict the results of a future experiment.
3. A future experiment is undertaken with this theory in mind, to see if it has predictive power. If the predictions are correct, it is a good theory.
Your comment is referring to step three. The experiment in the paper is step one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging
I think probably the most important thing is to get scientists to spend more time identifying and teasing out correlated variables to identify plausible mechanisms.
You can see in this article that authors already suggest a theoretic explanation, and I do not doubt that we'll see follow up studies trying to clarify situation.
I once had an advisor edit my draft over night and submit it as a paper with a bunch of juiced up numbers that weren't true, but made sense to the advisor even if the underlying scripts I ran didn't support it. I complained to them and the paper was withdrawn before publication, and immediately left their group. this was in quantitative biology- hard core bioinformatics with very sophisticated modelling.
But yeah, real experimental physics is hard to fake since reproduction is usually more straightforward than in other fields.
I'm stating the obvious here, but that is not a good advisor in any sense. It must have been difficult to leave, but it would be the only reasonable response.
It wasn't hard to leave, I just contacted another professor at berkeley and joined their lab the next day. The new advisor, while fairly dull, was methodic and pedantic and the idea of faking or juicing results would probably never have occured to him.
In short, in science if you're not a super-genius, it can be hard to compete with the super-geniuses and the cheaters. I found it easier to move to computer engineering than stay in science.
Yeeeesh.
I guess my science career was relatively clean. I knew a few fellow students who got screwed over by their advisors in the sense that the advisors demanded an excessive amount of publishable work to graduate.
And I saw plenty of personality conflicts, many of which could be lain squarely in the lap of the advisor.
But I never saw or heard of outright fraud, which makes me happy.
I'm not naïve. I know fraud is everywhere. And I know there's a lot of pressure to produce interesting results. I probably just got lucky.
edit: for anyone taking the plunge into grad school. I made my choice of advisor largely based on his reputation of looking out for his students ... and on his research as a secondary consideration. That may have helped me.
When I first got to grad school I immediately went to a group that had published a paper "solving parts of protein folding" using a lab-written code. Some 1 year after the paper was written, the PI could not give me that code, "because it had been lost when an SGI was reinstalled". I don't really trust results in papers unless I can see and hold code and reproduce the author's work, or a highly competent scientist implements their own version (I'm no good at reading papers and writing code to implement it, then run through all the steps of reproducing the original paper.)
Another enlightening moment was when a more senior grad student told me: make sure everything you do ties back to medical research, even if the relationship is extremely distant. You can get money from NIH from curing senator's family's diseases (cancer and heart disease).
When I was finally starting to apply for funding on my own through the NIH R01 grant program, I was turned down, without a score (meaning it was worthless and never should be funded). The next year, I was on the study section for that grant section and saw several more experienced PIs submit proposals that were very similar to (likely copied from) mine, and they were funded. I later learned I needed to spend several years reviewing grants before I knew enough to write a successful grant (oh, and make friends with everybody else in the study section, too).
On another study section dedicated to funding moving academic data and compute to the cloud, I turned down several grants because they asked for money for closet (on-prem) clusters. I was not asked to return, because the people I turned down were influential.
Basically, as has been pointed out many times before, the incentive system in academia is perverse and does not help people like me who just want to do high quality research but take our time to get the details right, and not get in competitions with other, more aggressive scientists. Many of us self-select out of science and end up as computer engineers or ML engineers or whatever in industry.
Pedantically speaking, it is not an experiment, it is an observation. Experiment is a kind of study where you control independent variable. In this case no cosmic radiation nor seismic activity were not manipulated by scientists. It is the reason why they speak about correlation but not causation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiment#Observational_studi...
Now that somebody found a signal that seems to predict earthquakes, start trying to predict earthquakes. Dig into the signals and gather new ones to try to see if there is any more information available.
Not that I believe any of this, but it seems we're just pulling stuff out of our asses so I figured I'd give it a shot.
LIGO, the gravity wave detecting interferometer, has arms 4 kilometers long. Along that distance, it can detect a change in length one ten thousandth the diameter of a proton. With an instrument that sensitive, it can just barely detect a handful of gravity waves a year, out of the thousands? that occur in the observable universe. Gravity waves are subtle things.
They are significantly impacted by tides for example.
Does this data correlate with weather events, earthquakes or cosmic rays?
Cosmic rays - Astrophysical events that generate gravitational waves can also generate electromagnetic and particle emissions. If a black hole crashes into a neutron star, all kinds of stuff is going to come out.
Edit: ah, you mean for any practical purposes. Duh.
However, we can also measure things that don’t do work, for example, a static magnetic field does no work on a charged particle (it cannot change its kinetic energy) but look at the swirls in a cloud chamber and it’s clear as day if there’s a magnetic field there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bead_argument
On the other hand, I definitely agree that gravitational waves are almost certainly too weak to cause any tectonic effects.
It seems counter intuitive but an analogy is very simple:
A 15 mph breeze will do almost nothing to push a person, but will exert tremendous force on a sail of sufficient size.
Earth, in this analogy, is a really big sail.
Moreover, your suggestion seems to indicate that you’re only considering kinetic energy, which would be a very myopic and reductionist take on these matters.
The earth is NOT a solid rock. It's a very thin layer of rock, floating on top of a pool of magma, itself floating in space. The rock itself flows on all sorts of time scales as well.
A sphere will be forced by the wind, almost the same amount as any other object, regardless of its density or weight.
it's not a pool of magma, the mantle is basically solid
(except on very large timescales)
That's just p-hacking.
If this sort of scientific astrology ends up providing precursor signals for future earthquakes, why would geologists have a problem with it?
We started the study with a good faith survey and intent to use space and ground signals in sync to detect impending earthquakes on nearish term. We had good technologists and scientists. As the study went on it became clear that all the scientists were completely unconvinced. Sure we could have built out the network but it wouldn't have done much. Most the scientists either lost faith or write dissenting opinions as part of the report. We did our job putting out the report but it was clear there was nothing to do after.
If this was real, would it not be easier to measure the perturbation of the magnetic field than measure the cosmic rays being let in by the perturbed magnetic field?
However, it's a more complex data set to work with, given the vast dimensional dynamics of the field itself vs measuring the flux of radiation.
I believe in particle physics this is known as the “look-elsewhere effect”. Basically if look long and hard enough for a pattern, you will eventual find it if your parameter space is large enough: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect
Predicting earthquakes has a big upside for humanity. If there is even a small correlation -- even if we don't yet understand it -- we can benefit from it.
Basically if you test a lot of hypotheses plot all the p-values and look to see if there is something that is a true outlier or whether it is expected given so many tests.
That seems like an extremely good thing to me. Looking for patterns and then figuring out causality later is a great way to solve real-world problems. Of course you can be led astray if your filters are too open, but if your work is rigorous and you still come out with a 6-sigma correlation then congratulations, you found a signal. What does it mean? How does it work? Who cares, there's plenty of time to figure that out. But in the meantime you can hypothesize that the connection exists, monitor it for a year or two, and if the correlation holds up and turns out to have some predictive value, then a winner is you.
I agree with you that if this observation proves to have predictive power, then the way it was found doesn't matter. But right now we're at the less reliable "we looked at all conceivable retroactive combinations of stuff and found this pattern" stage of the process.
there should be people dredging through petabytes of cern data like this, exploratory analysis can give you insight into things you didn't know to look for.
even if you find things that are bogus you figure out why and learn how to avoid it given the context of the data.
to say otherwise becomes a hindrance to progress. plus its not like we have any other way of predicting earthquakes, trying to read the magnetic field to predict events sounds really promising, i'd be willing to give it a shot even if it is bogus, that's just risk assessment.
Besides, the first "scientists" looked at the sky and just stared until patterns appeared.
You can't condemn scientists for looking at data. Not everything can be magicked up from first principles in a vacuum.
No scientist would claim that falsifiable hypothesis and empirical validation aren't needed. But I don't think any scientist would criticise someone for looking for patterns on a whim and pointing it out to others.
A favourite example[0].
Is it still P-hacking if you stumble upon a correlation in the historical record (after stumbling around for a while), call it a hypothesis, and then stick with it long though to gather a statistically significant amount of _new_ data to support it?
More broadly, are there ways to "go on a fishing expedition" that are still scientifically valid?
What's the old saying, "The best saying in science is not 'Eureka!', but rather 'Huh, that's weird...'"?
He then noted that it was the apple that moved, not the Earth.
A bit of skepticism is healthy but some of these threads are approaching downright dismissive.
There's a long history of research in this area to be aware of, though I know the paper in question doesn't elaborate on it.
Here's one physical theory for you, straight from NASA [1].
> In the ionosphere, the solar winds generate electrical currents. On the Earth surface, these currents cause magnetic field fluctuations. These fluctuations, penetrating the Earth interior, induce the electrical currents J, and, in the presence of the Earth magnetic field B, generate electromagnetic force, known as Lorentz force F = J × B. To study the relation of earthquakes and the Lorentz force, acting at the near onset times of strong earthquakes, we examine the Kp index, a logarithmic measure of the magnetic field deviation. The time varying Kp index gives us J, which in turn determines F.
> The Lorentz force tilts the subtle force balance in the earth crust towards triggering the release of stress strain energy, initiating an earthquake in a similar way as a mountain climber’s step can trigger the avalanches. The internal dynamics, however, are highly statistical.
> We find that the distinctive patterns of the Kp surges often strongly correlate to the onset of earthquake. This correlation depends on the seismic regions and the magnitudes of earthquakes. The stronger the earthquake is, more closely the Kp surge is associated. The statistical significance of nearly 100% is obtained for the Kp variations, synchronizing with more earthquakes in the Pacific Rim region.
[1] Geomagnetic Kp Index and Earthquakes (2018) https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234022172_Explosive...
"The strong negative correlation observed between the timing of silica-rich eruptions and solar activity can be explained by variations in cosmic-ray flux arising from solar modulation. Because silica-rich magma has relatively high surface tension (similar to 0.1 Nm(-1)), the homogeneous nucleation rate is so low that such magma exists in a highly supersaturated state without considerable exsolution, even when located relatively close to the surface, within the penetration range of cosmic-ray muons (1-10 GeV)."
(There seems to be a lot of death-related stats in there, so beware if that's triggering)
Isn't this the fundamental mystery about all science, in a way? You have to start with some kind of hypothesis, and that hypothesis likely comes from looking over various kinds of data and doing mysterious mental convolutions on them.
> Dr. Homola states, “In the scientific world, it is accepted that a discovery can be said to have been made when the statistical confidence level of the corroborating data reaches five sigma, or standard deviations.”
> Homola continues, “For the observed correlation, we obtained more than six sigma, which means a chance of less than one in a billion that the correlation is due to chance. We therefore have a very good statistical basis for claiming that we have discovered a truly existing phenomenon. The only question is, is it really the one we were expecting?”
This is not what p-values mean! P-values are not at all the chance of a result being erroneous. It's an unfortunately widespread misconception among people who should know better.
Eg., if there is no causal connection between X, Y then any analysis of association between X, Y is not a causal one.
Entire fields of people have been taught that stats can justify science -- and hence the heaps of pseudoscience.
It is science which justifies the use of stats; not vice versa.
> The causality they're claiming just does not have any physical plausibility.
Survey the literature and you’ll find plenty of evidence that there is some credence to the idea.
The central claim is that changes in cosmic ray frequencies can predict earthquakes. The proposed causal mechanism is changes in the geodynamo affecting the propagation of cosmic rays. The effect on cosmic rays is secondary to the changes in geomagnetism. Despite decades of people looking for evidence, changes in geomagnetism are not associated with earthquakes[0].
If this paper's hypothesis is true, geomagnetic fluctuations should co-occur with fluctuations of cosmic ray counts - thus geomagnetic fluctuations should also predict earthquakes. But they don't.
Claims of being able to predict earthquakes have had a long and not great history. Earthquake prediction is the faster-than-light travel of geophysics. Any claims that it is possible should be viewed with extreme scrutiny.
[0] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/are-earthquakes-associated-variati...
Frequency of detection of secondary cosmic radiation is very sensitive to geomagnetic conditions. That is not up for dispute.
The paper in question provides statistical evidence that "variations of secondary cosmic ray detection rates are periodically correlated with future global earthquake magnitude sum".
The paper contains no claims about precisely predicting seismic activity in terms of geographic location or time of occurrence. The authors make this abundantly clear.
The USGS page you linked has no citations or even a timestamp. I'd wager it hasn't been updated in ages. It's not the decisive source you want it to be.
Here's the paper in question if you want to actually read it: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2204/2204.12310.pdf
Take a look at this research from NASA, it is one of the many papers that completely contradicts your claim that "changes in geomagnetism are not associated with earthquakes": https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
How many comparisons did they do before stumbling on this result? Unreported.
Again, a p-value is not the chance that a result is erroneous - the statement you made is 100% mathematically incorrect. That was a major point of my previous post that you missed. It's a common misconception that the authors of this work are victims of. The linked PDF from the American Statistical Society explains things in more detail.
Apologies for the double negative in my last comment.
>P-values do not measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is true, or the probability that the data were produced by random chance alone.
It was very informative for me. Worth reading.
Perhaps it would have been more accurate if they phrased it: "which means a chance of less than one in a billion of seeing a correlation this strong if it's due to chance", but I think few readers would even notice the difference.
Edit: I just remembered that today is the 229th anniversary of a meteor fall in Siena, Italy, so big that it established tan undeniable correlation between falling stars and hundreds of chunks of iron lying on the ground. (Putting Newton's prejudice to rest.)
If my recollection serves correctly they were unable to get arrive at a good enough level of specificity to actually feel comfortable predicting an earthquake.
These cosmic ray events happened with enough regularity (and didn't result in earthquakes) that there was a legitimate concern about creating paranoia.
> Therefore, any substantial earthquakes linked to disturbances in the Earth’s dynamo flows would alter the magnetic field, thus impacting the path of primary cosmic radiation. The fallout of these alterations would be apparent in the changes in the counts of secondary cosmic ray particles recorded by ground-based detectors.
Wouldn't there be a more direct way of measuring changes in the magnetic field generated in Earth's core? Or is this method preferable because it's cheap and sufficiently accurate?
In fact that's the thing that triggers alarms for me here. Haven't they just found that we detect more cosmic rays when there's tectonic movement?
Cosmic rays are influenced by the magnetic field and the magnetic field is influenced by tectonic movement. Why are they pushing the line that cosmic rays cause earthquakes when there's a reasonable and testable alternative - we detect more cosmic rays when there's tectonic movement.
Of course. That's one reason among many of thinking this is all bullshit.
Popular discourse tends to be dominated by Newtonian ideas, as if earth was simply a rock in empty space orbiting a massive fireball called the sun. We landed on the surface of the moon by using such approximations. But they fail to explain many observations that modern technology has opened our eyes to.
For example, the coronal heating problem [1]. Possibly one of the greatest unanswered questions in astrophysics. Why does the temperature of the sun’s atmosphere increase as you get further away from the surface? We still don’t know exactly. But we have some hints.
Voyager 1 revealed to us that the dynamics of the heliosphere are much more complex than we imagined [2].
And we have observed that the sun emits a powerful electromagnetic field, which is intimately connected to a variety of spectacular phenomena here on earth. Like the northern lights, aka auroras [3]. Or massive electrical discharges in thunderstorms which reach into the highest layers of Earth’s atmosphere [4].
So I implore you to consider, why wouldn’t earthquakes be explained by solar dynamics? If not completely, at least partially.
It seems we may be on the cusp of realizing that our solar system - and perhaps our entire galaxy - is connected through electromagnetism. Entirely new fields like “space weather” and “plasma cosmology” are rising up from the depths of ideation and research. What a time to be alive.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-s-parker-sola...
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/voyager-092...
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-s-themis-sees...
Kind of reminds me of the inner tip of the blue cone in the Bunsen burner which is supposed to be the hottest point of combustion rather than at the bottom of the flame, and the top of the flame is supposedly the coolest?
Honestly I feel like all knowledge is some type of best effort approximation and I think it’s important to stay skeptical and open minded. I think it’s also a fun way to live. Enjoy the mysteries.
Knowing all the things would be an insufferable bore.
Why on earth is that the "only question"? What does that even mean?
I can think of many many questions and that isn't one of them:
* What is the mechanism that associates the radiation to the earth movement
* Are other objects on earth also affected?
* How can we use this to predict quakes?If there is a link between cosmic radiation and earthquakes (and that's a very big "if"), could it be Cherenkov radiation caused by super-high-energy particles exceeding the speed of electromagnetic radiation in bedrock/soil/whatever (not C, obviously, but the lower speed that the radiation travels through that media)? Basically a colossal natural version of detecting neutrinos by their flashes of light in a tank of water?
[1] https://twitter.com/webcamsdemexico/status/15729247312584622...
Then they create 5 day bins to correlate with the cosmic radiation. If an increase in cosmic radiation would cause an increase in seismicity "to not then 5 sigma" shouldn't it be most obvious in the cumulative count of radiation versus the cumulative count of earthquakes? Why would this only trigger larger magnitude events?
Also, since cosmic rays are the cause and the observations of them are global, wouldn't you see a global increase in seismicity? In fact, wouldn't this change in seismicity be long noted by seismologists even without knowing anything about cosmic rays?
They also seem to attribute mechanical stress of the crust to electromagnetic forces. Wouldn't you think someone would have noticed that their compass stopped working when an earthquake happens? Or aurora?
With such high correlations you would think it would be easier to just shift the cosmic data by 15 days and show how well it all goes together.
Also, I think most of those detectors are directional.
Mandatory link: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
> Jerry tells her that NASA is trying to kill the President using a secret weapon on the Space Shuttle that can trigger earthquakes.
Is the radiation causing earthquakes or it is caused by earthquakes (due to some unknown phenomenon?)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/b8592914-c53a-4c84...
I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s a connected universe. No thing is an island.
So surely metaphorical islands are likelier to preserve the property of being islands even if the physical ones turn out to be much more fuzzy.
GP was clearly mixing metaphor and real to create an effect. "Nothing is really an island" -> "not even real islands are so isolated as it may seem".
https://web.archive.org/web/20141213144822/http://earthquake...
In all seriousness though, it is pretty easy to find such correlations and I would take them with a huge grain of salt. For example there was a long-running theory that sunspots had a causal relationship to influenza epidemics, which turns out to be probably purely spurious: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28847318/
It's in that sliver of doubt that the big scientific discoveries lie...