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Comment by BigTTYGothGF | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of people in this thread who see "North Korea" and "nuclear test" and get fired up but would otherwise shrug if it were instead, say, "Oklahoma" and "fracking".

The supplemental information is available and says: > Our earthquake catalog consists primarily of small events with magnitudes of < 2.0 and there were 1399 of them.

The cited Ren&al says: > The magnitudes of these seismic events primarily range from 1.5 to 2.5 and that there were 647 of them.

USGS (https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/earthquake-and-energy-comp...) says that a magnitude 2.0 earthquake is the equivalent energy of 56kg of explosives, which is more than I'd want to be around but I think for people who actually use the stuff it's not a lot.

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This threw me into a rabbit hole for a bit. Apparently there is good evidence that a lot of historical earthquakes in california were due in part at least to the oil industry, which early on would not replace pumped out oil with water.

Now a days they claim they replace the oil with water and all is well. However, as anyone who has owned an ancient used car and has switched from conventional to synthetic motor oil would tell you, there's no way that would work. The assumption is that these voids the oil are in are these hermetically sealed vaults such that one can simply pump in more volume of liquid and balance out pressures. That seems like a big assumption to me. Water is obviously not nearly so viscous as crude oil. It will seep in situations where crude will not. It's probably leaking out like a sieve if its really choss all the way down in California. The oil as it is isn't even very well contained given how common tar seeps are.

Agriculture probably also plays a role. Central valley has sunken what is it 20-25 feet now from historic ground levels? Same issue as a void generated by an atomic test or oil extraction, one would imagine. Mining probably also plays a decent role. Really anything involving removal or non like for like replacement of structural substrate from the ground is probably liable to be associated with seismic activity.

Kind of depressing a realization if this is the case, like we've screwed ourselves with not just the air but the ground we stand on too. You can't really get that stability back without all this new potential energy leaving the system in the form of stuff falling down and new quakes and plates breaking loose and budging a bit more.

What kind of earthquakes in California ?

> Mining probably also plays a decent role.

In the Johannesburg area in South Africa, gold mining has produced up to half of all gold ever extracted in the world, with mines reaching depths of 4000m.

This has resulted in frequent seismic events, in the 2.0 to 3.0 range on the Richter scale, occurring on a daily or weekly basis, more occasionally reaching 5.0. This started around 1906 and still continues today. See:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S167477551...

>like we've screwed ourselves with not just the air but the ground we stand on too

I'm reminded of something Margaret Atwood once said which boiled down to the fact that there is no starting civilization over, ever again, if we fall back into the Dark Ages. the metals for copper tools and iron-making are in forms that require a lot of technology to even re-smelt, and all the easily accessible mines that don't require heavy machinery and engineering are long mined out

we either get it right this time around or it's over for us

> I'm reminded of something Margaret Atwood once said which boiled down to the fact that there is no starting civilization over, ever again, if we fall back into the Dark Ages. the metals for copper tools and iron-making are in forms that require a lot of technology to even re-smelt, and all the easily accessible mines that don't require heavy machinery and engineering are long mined out

> we either get it right this time around or it's over for us

Space, the final frontier.. *cue intro music

can't get to space if you can't even smelt a spade, imo

The materials just in the frame of a typical big box store would be sufficient for any basic blacksmith to make millions of spades (and shovels!) using nothing but basic charcoal and a blower.

And you can make several thousand human operated blowers, forges, and small utility buildings also with the materials in a typical big box store’s frame.

The biggest issue would be food and day to day energy requirements and fertilizer. A lot of our economy is highly dependent on refined hydrocarbons and derived products like ammonia/nitrates that aren’t locally producible right now.

For a smith to operate at all there has to be a level of societal stability that could well be too much of a starting assumption in this scenario.

Nah. Smiths literally came along with travelling war parties all the time.

In Europe, nearly every village had one (it was pretty required), and they operated even during active wartime. Because they had too.

All you really need is a skilled blacksmith, a forge, an anvil, and some hand tools. Well, and some fuel and iron.

All that can be transported by cart with a small team of people. In a village, even in wartime, you don’t need to move it, so it’s really just fuel and a few folks + metal feedstock, which is likely even more available from scavenged weapons and the like.

If you ignore all the metal every place around everywhere, then yeah it's harder to get to.

I have to believe we would be able to make due with the available mountains of metal that is already in use in things?

it largely depends on the metal but the issue is with quality, not amount. plus, you don't have much in the way of just iron items these days - you have steel which requires temps quite a fair bit above what's possible in a charcoal/coal-based forge to work. early copper metallurgy utilized ores that were 10%+ metals - much softer, more malleable. these days we work with less than a single percent (but from much larger veins). much smarter people have written about this than me: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025GsGe....400323M/abstra...

a better focus would probably be on the fact that there's no longer really easily accessible coal anymore, much less oil. there also are far less trees by which you can make charcoal and firewood (except in certain areas) and that's actually fairly important when it comes to crafting and technology: https://www.postcarbon.org/can-civilization-survive-these-st...

If human society collapses, our cities and landfills will become ores. Strange ores filled with unnatural mixtures of metals, but ores nonetheless.

The sources you've linked discuss mostly the recovery of additional metals on top of what we have already recovered. That's a different and much harder problem. It's worth remembering that historically, the amount of metal obtained was much smaller — the vast majority of the copper that has ever been mined was mined in the last century, even though humans have been using copper for thousands of years. But historically, that copper was mostly used for consumer products, while today it becomes electrical cables, so it's less obvious how much copper we all use. There's surely enough copper in the walls of my apartment for everyone living here to cook in a copper pan, even though we think of copper pans as being too expensive nowadays.

Yup, assuming post-collapse populations are smaller, we’d have unimaginable wealth available just salvaging from existing equipment and buildings.

On the other hand, it's kind of reassuring that if we cock it up bad enough this time around, we won't be given the opportunity to make the same mistakes a second time?

Eh, not really. Any large scale dump will contain riches - in both accessible energy sources, like burnable and melt able plastics and other materials and metals - that it dwarfs whatever was available to any pre-industrial society.

We might have a pretty rough time dealing, but we’ve got a lot of wealth accumulated above ground now, and we’d have plenty of chances to make a go at it.

Why are taking sci-fi authors seriously? They are entertainments, nothing more.

Looks like someone doesn't understand the difference between an attribution and an appeal to Authority

I wonder if there's an argument to be made that these little earthquakes help release stored potential energy in the crust, preventing it from building into a more severe and dangerous event?

When gas extraction caused earthquakes in Groenignen, this site was very clear on prioritizing fossil fuel extraction over a few small tremors.

What's a little permanent undermining of unknown scope across wide swaths of developed area if it means a decade or two of profitability over the working life of the well? I mean have you even considered the shareholders interests?

It's simple, really. Fracking has offsetting pro-social benefits in a way that NK possessing nuclear weapons does not.

“Pro-social” is a strange way to describe something that’s actively contributing to the death of our civilization.

Looked at another way, shale natural gas has largely displaced coal which emits more CO2 and can be burned in the same power plants. This base load allows for more wind and solar. Natural gas is a great bridge fuel.

> and can be burned in the same power plants

I don't believe nat gas is burned in the same plants as coal.

Most "closed coal plants" in the US are really plants that retrofitted to use nat gas.

here's a decent recap (now a couple years out of date)

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44636

Ah, cool.

It’s a straightforward retrofit.

If you could remove a gigaton of usable coal from the world and replace it with an equivalent amount of natural gas, that would be a nice improvement.

When the natural gas is displacing coal by being cheaper, that's pretty bad in the long run. We're still probably going to use that coal later, and cheaper fossil fuels reduce the price pressure to install renewables.

We probably won’t go back to coal, most of the cheap high quality surface level coal is gone and we have a lot of natural gas. We also may see a resurgence of nuclear power and a lot more solar of course.

If we were running out of cheap coal anyway then we would have been better off without the surge in natural gas.

Higher prices would promote a faster shift directly from coal to solar (or nuclear if the price works out). And there was already enough natural gas production to fill the gaps that solar, wind, and batteries can't fill.

This is some rhetorical thing people say, but you don't actually believe it, right? You're not that wildly delusional? You think that if the air is 4C warmer, we won't have laws, people, culture, or whatever else makes a civilization? And that in the mean time, people being able to heat their homes in winter and not freeze to death, and otherwise afford electricity, are not offsetting pro-social benefits?

It's worse than people think. The fact that North Korea-traditionally nuttier than all the Middle Eastern governments combined-gets mean Hollywood movies made about them while Saddam, Gaddafi, and Assad got regime changed sent a certain kind of message, you know? Not to mention, the Iranians, Syrians, Pakistanis, et all could have never got off the ground without massive North Korean help.

I'm saying this as someone who is on the whole deeply cynical about Boomer pearl clutching when it comes to atomic proliferation.

NK nuclear testing has stopped them from being on the active ‘shit list’ like Iran for… decades? Or at least stopped them from being bombed.

I’m sure they’d disagree.

That nuclear devices offer some benefit to the hereditary dictators of oppressed, impoverished North Korea does not actually make them "pro-social."

as I said, i’m sure they’d disagree.

I guess I'm not really interested in Kim Jong Un's opinion.

good thing they don’t have nukes, eh?

A certain highly respected American general wanted to make the border between North Korea and China a literal radioactive wasteland in order to cut off Chinese reinforcements and supplies.

We can all be very happy the US is not the sole owner of nukes lol.

As someone that has no stakes in the oil industry, I would describe fracking as deeply anti-social.

NK possessing nukes is the reason there hasn't been a war in the region for so long. Which gives a "good" model for Iran to follow. I'm not happy that NK has nukes, or that Iran is trying to get them, but you have to admit that while the US exists as it is, they are the only way for a nation to protect itself from constant wars and invasions. I would be willing to bet that Iran getting nukes would paradoxically make the Middle East much safer: the US and their allies would be forced to leave it alone, which in turn would shrink the anti-US sentiment in the long term, which would cut into the ranks of terrorist cells, etc.

It makes an invasion of Iran less likely, but it also probably means more conflict, not less.

Acquiring nukes rebalances the power between Iran and the US and its neighbors. Roughly equal pairs of states fight more than lopsided ones, historically. The probability for a win on either side is higher when on equal footing.

Nukes as a deterrent caps escalation. This emboldens the holder of the nukes in lower levels of conflict. See Russia with Ukraine (knowing NATO wouldn’t respond), Kargil after Pakistan got nukes, and NK sinking the Cheonan.

Iran getting a bomb probably triggers Saudi Arabia to follow suite, possibly Turkey and Egypt too. Many of the conflicts in the area aren’t (solely) defined by US presence. The Iran–Saudi, Sunni–Shia, and Israel–Iran rivalries to name a few.

It’s possible the dynamics shake out differently, but color me skeptical.

I'm no expert in geopolitics, but to me the relation between a nuclearized Iran and Saudi Arabia could become like that of North and South Koreas: tense but ultimately passive.

That relationship is (was?) a proxy for two mature superpowers. The dynamic between the mid-tier powers in the Middle East is not that similar, IMO. With the US realigning, I expect to see more activity in that conflict.

I can’t know the future, but if the model I’m proposing is correct we’ll see some NK/SK shake-ups soon. That won’t bode well for Iran.

Oklahoma hasn't threatened to nuke anyone.....yet.

But they did bomb their own people in the Tulsa Race Massacre

nono the state is the only thing that counts. Not the country the state is in or the cities in the state.

Oklahoma is part of US, and there were several threats! Just a few months ago against Iran!

Not Oklahoma but Trump has made nuclear threats from Maryland this summer...

(Not to be contrarian, but I rather thought usa has recently and repeatedly threatened to bomb and nuke countries into stone age... And in fact went significant way through that effort over last few months, to the tune of some $40bil or so, for no clear, consistent, rational, elucidated reason whatsoever. And of course, rather famously, is the only country that actually deployed nuclear weapons against other people).

I don't necessarily disagree with your underlying point mind you, but USA isn't what it used to be internationally, if it ever truly was. "Oklahoma / USA are peaceful, predictable. rational political entities" is a rather laughable point to try to make today :-/

Technically, Oklahoma is on the short list of locations that _have_ detonated a nuclear bomb on their enemies in wartime.

Isn't the US literally the only country to ever use a nuke against humans?

Fracking doesn't result in potential nuclear fallout or the likes of Seoul or Tokyo being held hostage.

Well oil is definitely the reason countries like Iraq or Venezuela have been held hostage by America.

Sure - but the content and intent of the article is clearly about understanding the geographic conditions that lead to sustained seismic activity, when that's not what our models currently predict.

And it's hardly like we're "super concerned about the tests because of the test itself" here... given we've triggered nearly 1000 underground nuclear blasts in the US alone, across several states (at least 6).

So... yeah - a relatively unstable state gaining nuclear capabilities sucks, but the interesting part of the discussion in the article is why we're seeing activity years after the testing.

Yes, and isn't it obvious why?

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