I don't believe the video quite says this (I watched the relevant section).
It's worth noting that they are mostly interested in critical phenomena in general, and earthquakes are kind of a drive-by application, treated along with fires and sand piles.
They do hint around the edges, but they don't head-on make the claim for earthquakes that small EQs materially lessen stress buildup and thereby make larger EQ's less likely.
I was looking for a credential of one of the people they interview, to see if they are really a solid earth person or more of a critical phenomena person -- their names aren't easy to find. This particular myth ("small earthquakes relieve stress") is a bit of a stinker in the solid earth community, and I think a solid earth person would be quite careful about their words as they discuss this.
I think you've summed it up correctly. It's not proof and some scientists claiming some things isn't the same as studies/evidence. However, is there evidence that it's not true? The fact is we do have these smaller movements and earthquakes quite regularly, so we don't really know what would happen after a long absence of them (do we? I suppose there are simulations perhaps that could be run? But I don't know that that's proof either way). To me though it makes a lot of sense that it would/could spur a huge event.
I think you intended this to be a validation of the idea that small quakes relieve stress and therefore lower the chance of a large quake.
The above link does not answer that question. It is relating stress release to "fault strength", or the maximum shear stress that can be withstood by the fault. There is an incidental relationship with depth that plays a role.
The video linked nearby (on criticality) also does not address the question at issue.
I'm only replying because I work adjacent to this area, and my understanding is that the idea that small EQ's release stress is a myth. Here [1] is another link, listed as #1 in the "Myths" category. And you can dig up quotes from none other than Lucy Jones [2] saying that this is a myth.
I don't work directly in this area, so I'm not willing to say absolutely no. But I'd really like to see a head-on reference supporting the claim that it's not a myth.
EQs are a release of energy. That energy is stored as stress prior to release. There is a finite amount of stored energy at any given time.
So the statement "EQs release stress" is true and it follows that adding the modifier "small" to the front doesn't change this.
It should also be immediately apparent that it would be very surprising if there were not statistical implications as a result of this. So surprising in fact that I would suggest that the burden of evidence should fall on those claiming that any such statistical effects are unexpected.
This part is unquestionably true. But since we don't have a direct measurement of the stored energy at a given time, the occurrence of an earthquake acts as both an indicator of release of stored energy but also, potentially, evidence of increasing stored energy.
Like how buying a Porsche costs money, and leaves you poorer than before you bought it, but when you see stranger buy a Porsche, you update towards believing that they're wealthy rather than poor.
Fair enough. I'm also not a geoscientist, and to clarify I didn't mean to imply any specific statistical effect there. It seems entirely reasonable to me that a series of EQs might tend to increase in intensity.
In reality I think (layman's impression) that there's rough (post hoc) evidence for both things. Foreshocks followed by noticably larger EQs as well as trains of progressively smaller EQs.
Precisely, and the 'myth' is worded in such a way that the effect of stress relieving pre-quakes is set to a big fat zero and that seems to be a thing more related to the composition of what is underground than the fact that it does not happen at all, and if it happens at what magnitude you would expect the effect to show up.
To me a myth is something that isn't true at all, not something that we do not have data on to be able to rule it out completely or that may be an influence just not a capital one. I think the most generous reading of the 'myth' claim would be that the energy available in the smaller quakes is too low to have a meaningful effect on releasing energy from a larger quake and I'll buy that. But at the same time an absence of such fore-shocks in an area where earthquakes are known to happen indicates that stress may be been building up over a longer time and that stress would be released in the next bigger quake if and when it happens.
This too may not be a big enough difference due to the immense increase in energy present in larger events (the scale is logarithmic). But its effect is quite probably still non-zero and for it to be a myth it would have to be zero.
Myth = the sun rotates around the earth
Myth = unicorns exist
Myth = the earth is 6000 years old
Those are directly falsifiable, and we know all of these to be categorical falsehoods.
Smaller earthquakes can - depending on local crust composition and other environmental factors - affect the amount of energy released in a larger one following, is not necessarily a significant effect (though even this would be tricky to establish) but I find it hard to believe they are completely unrelated though the effect may not be large.
For real: Earth science is complex. When you have domain experts literally saying the opposite of your guesses, in a section of an outreach webpage devoted to "Myths," reconsider your position.
Your link addresses a different claim than the one I made. So far we have release of stress (true by definition), statistical correlation (foreshocks and aftershocks), and reduction of a future event (your link).
As to objections about relative quantities, earthquake swarms exist. I think it's going to be just about impossible to make claims that are correct while also being applicable to all scenarios. A more limited claim that a particular quake or activity in a particular region does not exhibit a certain sort of relationship is going to be much more defensible.
I agree with our assessment of Quanta. I used to enjoy reading their articles, but the clickbait title formula has put me off. Also their status as a mouthpiece of the Simons foundation grantees.
I feel like I’m being a bit curmudgeonly, but I don’t read them much any more.
Thanks for this reference; I found this paper interesting, but it is a satisfiability solver. Inherently it cannot quantify the probability of a subset of events, but it can find a probability assignment given a set of constraints. I.e. prove possibility. More usefully it can show that no such assignment is possible.
Yeah, in 1988 the Internet appeared like a research network that connected universities. No money was directly at stake and the systems harmed didn't appear critical. Related to what Thomas says above, part of the response to the incident was to partition the Internet for a few days [2] - I don't know if such a thing would be possible now.
But looking into the specifics again after all these years [1], I read:
"The N.S.A. wanted to clamp a lid on as much of the affair as it could. Within days, the agency’s National Computer Security Center, where the elder Morris worked, asked Purdue University to remove from its computers information about the internal workings of the virus."
and that CERT at CMU was one response to the incident [2].
So there is a whiff of the incident being steered away from public prosecution and towards setting up security institutions.
Robert Morris did get a felony conviction, three years probation, and a $10K fine. As for hn users, aside from pg, Cliff Stoll has a minor role in the story.
Do you really think these cuts are done with the intent of positive effects on the space and earth science enterprise?
The model was that NASA did stuff that was pathfinding, typically in response to science objectives, and that commercial applications would follow. By design, it’s not mass production.
This works for Earth science stuff like land surface monitoring, methane monitoring, land subsidence, groundwater monitoring, sea level rise, etc. NASA developed these remote sensing technologies that have made it into commercial applications.
So there is a synergy between NASA science and commercial space. It does not have to be either/or.
I genuinely believe NASA funding should be reduced to 0% then ramped back up to eliminate the old blood and introduce people with new ideas and ways of thinking. NASA is also incredibly inefficient with their quantity of centers and conflicting specifications. People forget that NASA has been so mismanaged since Apollo that they designed the deadliest spacecraft ever - the Space Shuttle. If there’s a synergy between NASA and industry I don’t know about it and I don’t benefit from it! All the models and theories I use in my daily life were pioneered by IBM, DoW/AF and universities. I can’t actually think of a single model I use that came from NASA. Near-future I see Lunar Gateway as a debacle, distraction and money pit, likewise with SLS. In recent memory incumbent milaero companies flubbed Orion heat shield tiles (NASA could have prevented this if they actually had institutional know of this old technology), Starliner thrusters and SLS solid rocket boosters. They also binned nuclear thermal propulsion.
>> What surprised me was that initial budget request, which basically said, we, America, are never going to launch another space telescope. We're going to turn off 95% of the ones we have in orbit. We are getting out of that business, we don't want to ask those questions anymore.
So this hits on a few key points. It’s not just that this budget request is tossing out perfectly good technology maturation plans for getting the next large space telescope built (https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/programs/habitable-wor...), among other goals.
It’s also (see the second sentence) that the budget request will result in de-orbiting perfectly-functioning operational missions like OCO-2 (https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov/), and deactivating perfectly functional instruments onboard ISS that are returning data continuously right now. It’s a multi-billion dollar self-own. There’s no sense in it. (https://www.planetary.org/charts/fy-2026-active-mission-canc...).
For many of these missions, having a long-term continuous dataset is super-valuable —- obviously so for a CO2 monitoring mission, or missions monitoring land surface temperature, vegetation/forests, etc. They are built, launched, and returning data. It’s all gravy at this point.
As nearby commenters note, this has nothing to do with cost savings. It’s more like a mix of pure spite, owning some libs in Maryland and California, and an object lesson in who the boss is.
He had an incredible life and was such an original thinker. Just the list of people he knew (since childhood) is mind-blowing. I recommend his voluminous essay collection United States or the more personal Palimpsest.
There are straightforward emulation settings in which a trained emulator can be more accurate than a single forward run, even when both training and "single forward run" use the same accuracy settings.
Suppose you emulate a forward model y = F(x), by choosing a design X = {x1, ..., xN}, and making a training set T = {(x1, y1), ..., (xN, yN)}.
With T, you train an emulator G. You want to know how good y0hat = G(x0) is compared to y0 = F(x).
If there is a stochastic element to the forward model F, there will be noise in all of the y's, including in the training set, but also including y0! (Hopefully your noise has expectation 0.)
(This would be the case for a forward model that uses any kind of Monte Carlo under the hood.)
In this case, because the trained G(x0) is averaging over (say) all the nearby x's, you can see variance reduction in y0hat compared to y0. This, for example, would apply in a very direct way to G's that are kernel methods.
I have observed this in real emulation problems. If you're pushing for high accuracy, it's not even rare to see.
More speculatively, one can imagine settings in which (deterministic) model error, when averaged out over nearby training samples in computing y0hat, can be smaller than the single-point model error affecting y0. (For example, there are some errors in a deterministic lookup table buried in the forward model, and averaging nearby runs of F causes the errors to decrease.)
I have seen this claim credibly made, but verifying it is hard -- the minute you find the model error that explains this[*], the model will be fixed and the problem will go away.
[*] E.g., with a plot of y0hat overlaid on y0, and the people who maintain the forward model say "do you have y0 and y0hat labeled correctly?"
It's worth noting that they are mostly interested in critical phenomena in general, and earthquakes are kind of a drive-by application, treated along with fires and sand piles.
They do hint around the edges, but they don't head-on make the claim for earthquakes that small EQs materially lessen stress buildup and thereby make larger EQ's less likely.
I was looking for a credential of one of the people they interview, to see if they are really a solid earth person or more of a critical phenomena person -- their names aren't easy to find. This particular myth ("small earthquakes relieve stress") is a bit of a stinker in the solid earth community, and I think a solid earth person would be quite careful about their words as they discuss this.
reply