2K earthquakes in 1 day off Canada coast | Hacker News Reader

2K earthquakes in 1 day off Canada coast

livescience.com

136 pointsBrajeshwar76 comments

Map here https://www.earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca/index-en.php?tpl_r...

Thanks. A pet peeve of mine is when a geography-focused article doesn't include a map.

Also when earthquake articles make no mention of the magnitude of them. 2000 magnitude 1 quakes is way, way different than just a few magnitude 5 quakes.

Quite literally a magnitude 5 is 10000x the strength of mag 1!

Absolutely. Many people don't realize that earthquakes are measured using an exponential scale. A magnitude 8 quake is 10x stronger than a magnitude 7.

This setting at Earthquakes USGS also shows the quake group being discussed.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=31.27319...

Major collection from central Alaska near Denali National Park down the peninsula and fairly large group heading up California.

"Scientists say no cause for concern over imminent rupture; up to 200 small earthquakes per hour recorded"[0]

[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/earthquakes-...

better lots of small ones

Lots of small ones before serious quakes in Japan. See Earthquake swarms before the recent 7+ in Noto.

Stay prepared.

The article states:

>> This spot hosts a number of hydrothermal vents and sits on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, where the ocean floor is spreading apart. This area is separate from the subduction zone — a region where one tectonic plate is sinking into the mantle underneath another plate — closer to the coast that can create large, destructive earthquakes, said Zoe Krauss, a doctoral candidate in marine geophysics in the University of Washington.

A big one wasn’t likely or possible in Noto apparently. It happened and there was a flurry of quakes beforehand.

Not sure if you’ve experienced something like that but it’s extreme. If you live in that area I’d not stack anything too high or get under and propped up cars for a few weeks.

Edit: or downvote and ignore :)

I do live in western WA, where this is an ongoing concern, but it should be noted that a flurry of small quakes is pretty regular activity here, as anyone who regularly monitors the USGS earthquake map can attest.

Slow news day then I guess

Even planet Earth is going for microservices instead of monoliths

Planet Earth is a monolith.

This also provided a lot of context but was pretty far down into the article so I'll share here:

> This happens on an approximately 20-year cycle, she said, which puts the area right on schedule: The last time it was this seismically shaky was in 2005.

Pet peeve.

I dont know where the exact line actually is, but please stop calling any earth movement below a 5 an "earthquake"

We have an english word for it.

Its a tremor. Lets use it.

An earthquake implies mass destruction.

A tremor at most is a few dogs barking, and a few people getting spooked

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake#Terminology

Using the strongest word, when a more appropriate one will do, technically correct or not, is wrong.

Or will you be happy when you read a story about $x losing exabytes of data, then you read the article, and it's 0.000000012 exabytes?

Please don't make up your own definition of a word and then get mad at people for not using it your way.

An Earthquake is a sudden shaking of the earth that causes seismic waves. Nothing about it requires mass destruction.

I saw some negative numbers which surprised me, so I looked it up.

Found this for anyone else who is also curious:

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-can-earthquake-have-negative-m...

I correctly guessed that it was due to being a logarithmic scale, having known about dB and the like.

disclaimer: I know nothing about this stuff.

> This area is separate from the subduction zone

150 miles off the coast doesn't sound that far from the subduction zone. Seems hard to believe there wouldn't be some tectonic relationship between the areas.

The phrasing is a little unfortunate, but this area sits on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, which is in one sense the "origin" of the Juan de Fuca plate. If you imagine the overall Pacific Plate and the North American plate, in the area off the coast of Vancouver/Oregon/Washington there's an other mini plate wedges between them called the Juan de Fuca Plate. In this area, it's the Juan de Fuca plate (not the Pacific plate) which is subducting under the North American plate.

The boundary between the Juan de Fuca plate and the Pacific plate is this Juan de Fuca Ridge. This ridge is a site of sea floor spreading - it's not subducting.

So there is a tectontic relationship between the two sites - sea floor spreading at the ridge is one of the factors that drives the subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate. But at the same time, any activity happening at the ridge is not "caused" by the subduction.

So that sounds like “the ocean floor is ripping apart” is a normal and expected phenomenon in that area.

Trying to get a sense of what's going on - and you seem knowledgeable. Is this thumbnail a reasonable approximation?

To my completely uninformed mind, it seems like you're saying, there's no huge plate to plate buildup of pressure, it's more like the ocean floor is spreading out, kinda like that picture?

https://www.earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca/images/intro/wallA...

> But at the same time, any activity happening at the ridge is not "caused" by the subduction.

Is that true? One of the leading theories of the cause of plate motion is "slab pull", which comes from subduction zones.

The point is that subduction zones are convergent plate boundaries (two plates are coming together, and one dives under the other) while rifting zones like this are divergent plate boundaries (two plates are spreading apart). Distance doesn't matter, it's the direction of travel.

disclaimer: I'm not an expert, but I've been watching some geology lectures focused on the pacific northwest [1] for fun recently.

This is on the Jaun de Fuca Ridge, on the other edge of the Juan de Fuca plate [2] from the Cascadia subduction zone, so it's related in the sense that it's the same tectonic plate, and the plate is very small (as far as I understand, it's a remnant of a plate that has been subducting under North America for a very long time). It is not (in my very-non-expert opinion) necessarily related in a direct sense to what is happening in the subduction zone.

[1]: e.g: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcKUIuDhdLl92gfymRabw... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_de_Fuca_Plate

Wow, that playlist is absolute gold. These kinds of instructional, high-quality, long-form lecture series are IMO maybe the best thing on the internet. The kind of thing when I encounter it makes me take a step back and really appreciate the fundamental beauty and utility of the internet.

A few other examples:

  - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9GwT4_YRZdBf9nIUHs0zjrnUVl-KBNSM
  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncd6q9uIEdw&list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ
  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycJEoqmQvwg&list=PLbN57C5Zdl6j_qJA-pARJnKsmROzPnO9V
  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps8jOj7diA0&list=PL9D558D49CA734A02

Sometimes I wish there was a frontend for YouTube that only has these kind of long-form lecture series, but I've never found one. I think part of the reason why is that essential "quality" is somewhat ineffable.

You can't mention the Juan de Fuca ridge without mentioning the claustrophobic 90s sci-fi psychological thriller "Starfish" by Peter Watts, which he graciously hosts in its full text for free on his delightfully Geocities-esque website: https://rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KSwIcrKEOs

Site of a possible volcanic eruption in the future.

Dramatic headline, for what is basically a "hey neat, we can study this process" article.

I personally would consider the reality of what is taking place to be really quite dramatic, even if it isn’t any threat to humans.

Maybe it is the Kaiju trying to break free!!

Monster of Lochness relocated

Now I’m picturing a Kaiju in https://youtube.com/watch?v=f4Mc-NYPHaQ.

In Pacific Rim, 2024 was when that movie took place

Someone get Boston Dynamics on the line, we have work to do.

Hollywood has been warning us of Kaiju attacks for decades. It's our own fault at this point for being so unprepared. But hey, that's a real nice adtech system you've built instead. Maybe they can figure out how to use their invasive tracking on the Kaiju as an early warning system.

Our AI startup has an LLM trained on the hollywood scripts. We are using it to determine where and when will be the next moster attack.

We may still get a decent script out of these tokens...

It may have been overfitted to the US though.

Had not heard of the term, so googled it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiju

Possible that this could explain some of the recent unexplained ocean warming?

The ocean warming is well explained. It’s the result of removing sulfur compounds from ship fuels. This change reduces could cover and increases the flux of solar radiation into the ocean causing heating. This is well agreed upon by scientists and not controversial. Cloud cover reduction is measurable and clearly visible in pre and post 2021 satellite imagery where shipping lanes have cloud trails before the change and do not have cloud trails now.

How did the ocean stay cool before steamships were invented?

There was less CO2 in the air.

There was less CO2 in the atmosphere, which increased its capacity to cool off the oceans.

They did not.

We don't know that they did. It takes satellites to get a representative measure of ocean temperatures worldwide. There's some noisy data from ships dipping mercury thermometers into the oceans, but this was hardly a widespread practice.

I've heard that theory is pretty contentious. I'm certainly not an expert though

Actual information for those interested.

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/aqua/nasa-study-finds-evidence...

So the change in regulation happened in 2020. How then does this hypothesis explain changes in ocean temperature before then? What is the relative magnitude of the correction vs CO2-only-based models?

It doesn't. This model isn't an alternative to CO2 based atmospheric warming models, it just explains a very recent trend in ocean temperature. This branched off a discussion about recent temperature trends. Everyone asking questions about general long term trends either aren't reading or are starting a different conversation.

GP explicitly referenced this phenomenon in an unqualified manner when addressing ocean warming. If they wanted to be understood the first time, they should have clarified the context.

If you check, the GP said "the recent unexplained warming". That's sufficient qualification to say that this is the explanation.

Of course the sudden recent spike is on top of an existing warming trend. And that trends is due to long-term trends from CO2.

"recent" is enough of a weasel word that context is still needed.

I don't understand how china show nothing for the chart "% of cloud clouds from ships.

Probably no data. China will not make data publically available if it makes them look bad.

How would they stop data from being collected by NASA satellites?

Presumably for the same reason the Gulf of Mexico doesn't show up despite having six of the ten largest US ports. I'd guess they only tracked the open ocean, but whether that's a design decision or those types of clouds don't form over certain bodies of water I couldn't say.

Either way, much of the traffic in the Pacific comes from or ends at China, I don't think anyone is denying that.

Why would the extraordinary heating effect start in March 2023 then?

North America is done going through most of its winter phase

Ah yes, global ocean temperatures are famously tied to winter on a single continent.

Ship tracks are concentrated to an from that continent. So the effect of the clearing of those tracks was concentrated on those oceans. The fact that they could warm more easily than expected, only mattered when they started to warm. And then a sufficient area warmed sufficiently quickly to impact global ocean temperatures.

That's the problem with snarky dismissals like the one that you just gave. Often they are missing some important point that will move the think you are ridiculing from ridiculous, to surprisingly reasonable. And if that happens, you're the one who looks bad.

As an alternative, I would suggest curiosity questions. If there is no good answer, your point is still made. And if there is one, you will still look good. The only disadvantage is that you don't get the pleasure of that "gotcha" moment.

Everything I've seen indicates scientists are completely flabbergasted with this six sigma warming. For example https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/06/14/record-war...

Your theory is mentioned in the article and is far from a valid, complete explanation.

The warming isn't localized—or even more prevalent—in that area.

Hmm. Yea, you would expect to see localized warming I imagine

I thought this was explained by excess greenhouse gases.

Ref: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/....

Over the long-term, yes. But the very recent, very acute 1.5 degree warming is unexpected against pure CO2-based models. I've read a bunch of theories (reduction in certain type of emissions from ships being a prevalent one), but nothing conclusive

We are increasing the energy imbalance in the earth system. A large part of that energy is absorbed by oceans. And at the same time our temperature buffers like the arctic sea ice, are disappearing.

I think we're seeing the same thing that is always seen when a complex system is sufficiently perturbed. Loss of stability, chaotic behaviour, and eventual collapse.

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