If you have the means and want to do some good, donate to the Wonder Fund by @theAGU and @WomenDoingSci, which funds Black and Indigenous women in the geosciences to go to research conferences: womendoingscience.com/wonderfund
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How do earthquake “prediction” con artists make it LOOK like they have a good track record, even though they’re totally unscientific hoaxters?
Let a seismologist fill you in.
Thread:
First, to be abundantly clear: no one can usefully predict earthquakes before they happen. Not you, not your pet, not some guy on the internet. We’d all love if good predictions were possible (seismologists included!), but nothing yet has stood up to scientific rigor.
Why talk about this? With the recent swarm on the Brawley Seismic Zone, we (again) saw prediction charlatans try to prey on anxieties and peddle misinformation. That sucks, of course, but it’s also actually dangerous, because it can muddle important information from real experts.
It’s here: the lockdown seismology paper is out in @ScienceMagazine! Here’s a thread sharing how this paper came to be, an intro to what we found, and a note on why it’s interesting. science.sciencemag.org/content/early/…
Back in March, @seismotom posted this figure to @Seismologie_be of ambient seismic noise on a seismometer in Belgium, showing a decrease in noise power when their local lockdown went into effect:
Lots of seismologists (myself included) were intrigued when we saw it, so we each started processing data from our local areas, posting the results to Twitter, and discussing it all in the replies. It was social distancing seismic noise, and social media seismology!
Required reading for geoscientists in the U.S. (and recommended reading for anyone who loves the outdoors) relevant to recent events: "Black Faces, White Spaces" by Dr. Carolyn Finney, about the relationships between Black Americans, the outdoors, and environmental organizations.
The book discusses the history of Black relationships with the environment, the way that this history informs modern collective memory, Black representation in outdoors-focused media and organizations, and Black action for and exclusion from environmental causes.
One major point of the book is that many outdoors and environmental spaces have been and still are unfriendly and unsafe for Black people, as demonstrated by recent cases like Christian Cooper, leading to a disconnect in Black participation in and perception of the outdoors.
I just learned on the @USGS earthquake history page that the largest recorded quake on May 20th was a M7.2 in 1990 in South Sudan. Event page: earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/ev…
Africa isn't the first to most minds when thinking of quake-prone areas, but it does get some! Short thread:
Here's a map of quakes with M>6.0 since 1980 in the @USGS catalog. As you might guess, most large quakes (~130 of the ~150 shown) occur on the major tectonic plate boundaries surrounding the continent.
The quakes that are actually on the continent tend to follow the East African Rift system, which is like an almost-plate-boundary that's slowly pulling apart the Nubian Plate and the Somalian Plate (minor plates that sometimes get lumped into one African Plate). @USGS diagram:
Several folks have asked me questions about the seismic noise that folks like @seismotom and I have been posting, so here's a little primer thread on what seismic noise is, what's changing with it during COVID-19 shutdowns, and what that all means.
We all know that the ground can move and shake pretty dramatically during an earthquake, but the ground is actually moving ALL the time! In the times without earthquakes, the motion is way too small for any person to feel, though.
That continuous hum of tiny motion is what we call "seismic noise". You can think of it like background audio noise. No one is talking or playing music in my house right now, but there's still a little bit of noise like the fridge running, the wind in the trees outside, etc.
Know a kid who would rather watch #Frozen2 on repeat than do schoolwork?
Well then, buckle up right here for a kid-friendly, activity-filled, Frozen-themed science lesson thread from me, glaciologist Elsa the #SciencePrincess! ❄️👸👩🔬
First off, let’s get our Frozen on! Watch the video for Show Yourself, and sing along if you want! 🎶 This is when Elsa goes to a glacier, so this is where we’ll look for some science:
This song calls the glacier “a river full of memory”, a line from the lullaby Elsa and Anna’s mother sang. Real glaciers are rivers full of memory, too! To see why, let’s learn what a glacier is and how they form...