Tuesday, 9 December 2008

No shit, Sherlock!

Actual headline on BBC website today:

Earthquakes can 'spark eruptions'

My latest blogpost: No shit, Sherlock!Tweet this! Posted by Mark Wadsworth at 13:02

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6 comments:

AntiCitizenOne said...

In other news...

Bears in woods, shit.
Pope seen wearing pointy hat.

9 December 2008 at 14:18
Anonymous said...

And,,, Eruptions cause earthquakes.

More startlingly obvious 'facts' can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/default.stm

9 December 2008 at 15:30
Pogo said...

Yet another expensive report from the Department of the Bleedin' Obvious!

9 December 2008 at 18:05
Anonymous said...

These are actually very interesting results, the impact of which has been carefully lessened by the BBC.

We know that earthquakes are closely related to eruptions on a local scale, but no-one expects an earthquake 500km away to increase volcanic activity.

If you live near a volcano (even a dormant one) this means that you have a much larger area to worry about than you did a few days ago.

I wrote a longer piece, but to be honest it isn't a lot better than this summary.

10 December 2008 at 19:04
Mark Wadsworth said...

500km? That's right next door in seismological terms.

10 December 2008 at 20:05
Anonymous said...

Yes and no. 500km is nothing on the scale of many geological processes, but what we really care about is the area that the stress field related to an earthquake covers as this defines it's region of direct influence.

This figure gives an idea of the size of influence of earthquakes. From it we see that earthquakes trigger other earthquake events within 10-35 km (I don't really trust it over more than 100 day periods). This is a mean, so averages out all the close ones and ignores the outliers that are further away, so the region of influence is bigger than this (0-100 km I would guesstimate).

Thankfully the exact number isn't critical here, but we can see that the expected region of influence is much smaller than the 500 km in this new research.

Note, the figure above came from some phd research.

11 December 2008 at 17:29

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