scholarly journals Earthquake weather and climate change: Should we stress about the forecast?

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles P. Wilson ◽  
Gillian R. Foulger ◽  
Christopher Saville ◽  
Samuel P. Graham ◽  
Bruce R. Julian

ABSTRACT Relationships between the weather and earthquakes have been suspected for over 2400 yr. However, scientific evidence to support such relationships has grown only since the 1980s. Because faults in Earth’s crust are generally regarded as critically stressed, small changes in stress and pore-fluid pressure brought about by rainfall, snow, and atmospheric pressure and temperature variations have all been proposed to modulate seismicity at local and regional scales. Elastic static stress changes as low as 0.07 kPa and pore-fluid pressure changes as low as 0.5 kPa have been proposed to naturally trigger earthquakes. In the UK, the spatial distributions of onshore earthquakes and rainfall are highly nonuniform and may be related; the wetter and most naturally seismically active areas occur on the west side of the country. We found significant spatial and temporal relationships between rainfall amount and the number of earthquakes for 1980–2012, suggesting larger volumes of rainfall promote earthquake nucleation. Such relationships occur when human-induced seismicity is included or excluded, indicating that meteorological conditions can also modulate seismicity induced by subsurface anthropogenic activities such as coal mining. No significant relationships were observed for monthly time lags, suggesting that the triggering effect of rainfall in the UK is near-instantaneous or occurs within 1 mo. With global climate changing rapidly and extreme weather events occurring more frequently, it is possible that some global regions may also experience changes in the spatial and temporal occurrence of earthquakes in response to changes in meteorologically induced stress perturbations.

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kodai Nakagomi ◽  
Toshiko Terakawa ◽  
Satoshi Matsumoto ◽  
Shinichiro Horikawa

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.


2019 ◽  
Vol 767 ◽  
pp. 228168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melodie E French ◽  
Greg Hirth ◽  
Keishi Okazaki

2012 ◽  
Vol 117 (B5) ◽  
pp. n/a-n/a ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Malagnini ◽  
Francesco Pio Lucente ◽  
Pasquale De Gori ◽  
Aybige Akinci ◽  
Irene Munafo'

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