Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Listener Question - Can Human Noise Damage the Earth? (GeoShort)

Transcript

Listener Question - Can Human Noise Damage the Earth? (GeoShort) · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, hey everyone, welcome to Geo Shorts.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Today we are going to answer a listener question.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: But before we do that, we have a quick favor to ask of you.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the favor.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: If at the end of this podcast, whether you've listened to all our episodes or maybe this is the first one you've listened to, if at the end of this episode you have learned something cool or even just enjoyed yourself a little bit, please share this with someone you think might enjoy Planet Geo.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: We work really hard to uh convey our passion for the geosciences, and we love talking about how important the geosciences are, and we really just want to share this with as many people as possible.
• 0:43
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• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: We'd really appreciate it.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: All right, let's get to the question.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Today we've got a listener question, and this comes from Brenda.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the question is related to episode four, where we were talking about COVID and during the COVID lockdowns, how human-induced seismic noise, people driving around in their trucks, how that decreased on Earth.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the question was does human seismic activity damage Earth in any way?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: So the that's the question, Chris, that I'm gonna pose to you.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Does human seismic activity damage Earth in any way?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yes or no?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the the no is the short answer.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's yeah, it's no.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this kind of leads into uh maybe a broader question about earthquakes in general, and it's also a misconception that we commonly come across in geology is that earthquakes are rare.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you know that's the misconception that earthquakes are rare, right?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And they are not rare.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one of the things that no, no, I have in my room a nine by thirteen foot map that is laminated, it's a world map, and uh one of the things I refer to it all the time in class.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I do with my geology classes is my students plot, I have little one square centimeter sticky notes that I buy, and they and I have them in different colors, and they plot the earthquakes every Thursday morning.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: They come in before school and they have to plot the earthquakes that have uh happened during the course of that week leading up to.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I set the parameters at anything that is a 4.5 and above.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, on the Richter scale.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: So these are sizable enough earthquakes where you you would feel them.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these are not the the tiny earthquakes and so on.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so what we see, two things really is one, wow, there's a lot.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: They are usually plotting between 70 and 90 earthquakes a week.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so these earthquakes four and a half are things that you'll feel it if you're standing kind of right on top of it.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're not gonna feel it from very far away, though, if they occur.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: So 70 to 90 a week.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: Is that what you're saying?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, approximately.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a that's a lot.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, it doesn't take long before holy cow, you have a lot of sticky notes on exactly, right?
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing though that's pretty cool about it is you can clearly see patterns.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you you see the plate boundaries that we talked about in episode two of plate tectonics.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: You see these plate boundaries emerging due just to the pattern of of earthquake distribution on the on in the world.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, very cool.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: To kind of bring it back to the question, so four and a half, these are not human-induced, then anything four and a half and bigger is not human-induced.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: These are not human seismic noise that we're talking about.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, basically, some of the biggest earthquakes that humans can can generate are like twos and threes at most.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: And most of the seismic noise that we're talking about during our COVID episode was much, much smaller than that.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, although humans do create earthquakes, they're very, very, very small usually.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there's a huge amount of earthquakes per year globally.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's a million earthquakes on average that occur that are below a two magnitude, so tiny things that nobody it doesn't affect anything really.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it just creates this background noise, this static noise for anybody who's sitting around trying to detect earthquakes.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's a place on one of the USGS earthquake sites that I signed up for where they send me a text alert anytime there's an earthquake anywhere in the world.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so I get it like right away.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really cool, but uh, you know, I had it set to I think five and above.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I was getting text alerts in the middle of the night, and it was like it was driving Jenny not super annoying.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: It lasted about a day.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: All right, so I set it at now, I think six and above.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so I get a text alert anytime there's an earthquake, and it tells you the you know, the size, the magnitude of the earthquake, tells me the location, when it happened, and all that kind of stuff.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just a it's a it's kind of a neat thing that just ties into this question.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, all right.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's a wrap.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, no human-induced seismic noise did not does not damage Earth in any way.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Good question, though.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, good question.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: All right, and uh with that, we'll wrap it up here and stay tuned for next episode next week.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Take care, see you next week.