Increased gravitational pull during rare celestial alignment?
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To quote the largest study of some 27,000 seismic events in 2004 by Elizabeth Cochran on earth tides and shallow thrust earthquakes that found, and I quote..
"We show a correlation between the occurrence of shallow thrust earthquakes and the occurrence of the strongest tides. The rate of earthquakes varies from the background rate by a factor of 3 with the tidal stress. The highest correlation is found when we assume a coefficient of friction of μ = 0.4 for the crust, although we see good correlation for μ between 0.2 and 0.6. Our results quantify the effect of applied stress on earthquake triggering, a key factor in understanding earthquake nucleation and cascades whereby one earthquake triggers others."
Another quote from the study is "We focused on a subset of shallow thrust earthquakes with depths of 0 to 40 km because these earthquakes are in regions with the largest tidal stresses."
This study was twice as large as 13,042 events Vidale and Agnew used in 1998 that found a 2% increase in earthquake frequency when tidal stress promotes failure along normal faults.
But neither of these studies were conducted around or during a rare celestial alignment.
How ever thirteen of the past fifteen earthquakes over 6.0 the past month have been of the shallow variety, 0-40 mile depth.
Last edited by Astro Art; 04-19-2014 at 03:05 PM..
Hmm for some reason a Creedence Clearwater song (Bad Moon Rising) comes to mind. Amazing hour our failing neurons make flawed connections with unrelated things. Maybe Bad Moon Rising is the source of concern, the lyrics are a bit apocalyptic.