Science, Space and Technology News 2024
A new study from MIT shows that heavy snowfall and rain may trigger earthquakes by affecting underground pressures, offering fresh insights into the relationship between climate and seismic activity in Japan. Credit: SciTechDaily.comresearchers have linked heavy snowfall and rain to earthquake swarms in northern Japan, suggesting that extreme weather events can trigger seismic activity by altering underground pressures.
“We see that snowfall and other environmental loading at the surface impacts the stress state underground, and the timing of intense precipitation events is well-correlated with the start of this earthquake swarm,” says study author William Frank, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences . “So, climate obviously has an impact on the response of the solid earth, and part of that response is earthquakes.
The study’s lead author is former MIT research associate Qing-Yu Wang , and also includes EAPS postdoc Xin Cui, Yang Lu of the University of Vienna, Takashi Hirose of Tohoku University, and Kazushige Obara of the University of Tokyo.Since late 2020, hundreds of small earthquakes have shaken up Japan’s Noto Peninsula — a finger of land that curves north from the country’s main island into the Sea of Japan.
The researchers generated an evolving picture of seismic velocity beneath the Noto Peninsula and observed a surprising pattern: In 2020, around when the earthquake swarm is thought to have begun, changes in seismic velocity appeared to be synchronized with the seasons.The team wondered whether environmental changes from season to season could influence the underlying structure of the Earth in a way that would set off an earthquake swarm.
“We had seismic velocity observations, and we had the model of excess pore pressure, and when we overlapped them, we saw they just fit extremely well,” Frank says.
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