Solar flares triggering seismic events

[Idoubt]

Well I'm sure a lot of us have seen websites predicting the end of the world from solar flares causing earthquakes.

I'm a physics grad student and with my limited knowledge I have the impression that all such theories are pseudo scientific.

But still I want to ask the question. It is conceivable that solar storms/flares, can effect the Earth in such a manner?

The magnetic fields created interacting with the Earth's own magnetic field perhaps which in turn effects the crust in some manner?

 

[Ken G]

It's pseudoscience. You can go outside and see an aurora, and there's the energy being released on Earth from the effects of the solar flare. Is an aurora going to set off an earthquake? It won't even affect your compass.

 

[Vanadium 50]

You're a grad student. You should be able to quickly answer these two questions with a little time with Google/a library:

(1) How often is there a solar flare? Is it dependent on the solar cycle?
(2) How often is there an earthquake? Is it dependent on the solar cycle?

 

[Ken G]

Yes I agree-- correlating earthquakes with the solar cycle would be an excellent empirical test of any connection.

 

[Idoubt]

I agree that to say that the energy of a solar flare 'causes' an earthquake is absurd, but is it truly inconceivable that the magnetic interaction from a solar event can interact with the Earth's own field or create a significant enough impression 'somewhere' to 'trigger' one.

( my guess is of course that it can't but it would be an uneducated one.)

As for cross-referencing Earth quakes and solar events, well I tried to but then I realized that the better way would be to conclude based on theory whether it was possible.

I'm not asking if there is experimental data that points to or away from such a thing, my question was if the energies involved were even comparable.

( again my guess is that the energy reaching Earth would not be enough to give a kick to even the most unstable fault lines, but again I don't have a good feel for the numbers and orders involved so I wanted to hear it from someone who does. )

 

[Radu094]

Well, given the way earthquakes work, someone will eventually argue that some butterfly landing on a specific rock caused the whole thing. On an unrelated note, I have spent most of this morning convincing people that 'an unusually low lunar perigee' is not the cause for the disaster in Japan.

I guess one has to make a distinction between 'cause' and 'trigger' . Can a solar flare cause an earthquake? No. It takes more than a few charged particles to do that. Can a solar flare trigger one given a pre-existing condition? You can speculate about a chain of events where one leads to the other: charged particles->earth magnetic field->magma chambers->tectonic pressure->earthquake triggered.
It's all speculation and circumstantial. Almost none of those chain arrows can be proven...

 

[ibysaiyan]

Well, given the way earthquakes work, someone will eventually argue that some butterfly landing on a specific rock caused the whole thing. On an unrelated note, I have spent most of this morning convincing people that 'an unusually low lunar perigee' is not the cause for the disaster in Japan.

I guess one has to make a distinction between 'cause' and 'trigger' . Can a solar flare cause an earthquake? No. It takes more than a few charged particles to do that. Can a solar flare trigger one given a pre-existing condition? You can speculate about a chain of events where one leads to the other: charged particles->earth magnetic field->magma chambers->tectonic pressure->earthquake triggered.
It's all speculation and circumstantial. Almost none of those chain arrows can be proven...

People often think it to be this way but then again how often do we get these solar flares? Going by the number of Earth quakes per year I suppose the sun should be in it's RGB stage by now( actually I take that back,earth would cease to exist)

 

[Vanadium 50]

As for cross-referencing Earth quakes and solar events, well I tried to but then I realized that the better way would be to conclude based on theory whether it was possible.

Then you are a bad scientist.

You have a hypothesis. You have the data that will confirm or refute it. But you don't want to look at it. I hope that your time in graduate school will lead you to adopt a different attitude, because at the rate you're going, you won't have much of a career. Seriously.

To answer the questions (since you won't look them up):

(1) Typically, there are a handful of solar flares (1-10) every year. The number of solar flares correlates with sunspot number, and has an 11-year cycle. The exact number of flares depends on the minimum threshold you call a "flare". You can see the correlation http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2006/21dec06/hathaway2.gif" .

(2) Typically, there are about 50 earthquakes per day. (Again, with a number depending on your minimum threshold) There is no correlation with the solar cycle.

So you have two problems - one is that there is no correlation with the 11-year cycle, and the other is that the number of earthquakes is 3 or 4 orders of magnitude larger than the number of flares, so at most flares would be causing 0.01-0.1% of them.

 

[Chronos]

Correlation between earthquakes and solar flares seems nonsensical, but, there may be something to it - e.g;,

Whether solar flares can trigger earthquakes?
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUSMIN33A..03J

Universality in solar flare and earthquake occurrence
http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0602208

 

[jumpshot]

test.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Chronos, the second reference says that the causes of the two phenomena can be modeled similarly - earthquakes relieve mechanical stress, and solar flares relieve magnetic stress. The first one is an abstract of a talk, where the words "no evidence" feature prominently.

 

[Ken G]

Yes, the second article is saying there are similarities in the rules that earthquakes and solar flares obey, it's like saying there are similarities in what makes an apple fall and what makes the Moon stay in orbit, it's not saying the Moon makes apples fall. And a check on "find similar abstracts" applied to the first article gets no hits that suggest any correlation between solar flares and earthquakes. Maybe Jain is right, I haven't tried to analyze his data, but at the moment his hypothesis is a lead brick. But it's good to connect the question to actual papers, until now we were just giving answers that seemed logical.

 

[Chronos]

Oops on the second paper. You are correct, they were noting similarities in characteristics of occurrence patterns - not claiming any correlation.

 

[Idoubt]

Then you are a bad scientist.

You have a hypothesis. You have the data that will confirm or refute it. But you don't want to look at it. I hope that your time in graduate school will lead you to adopt a different attitude, because at the rate you're going, you won't have much of a career. Seriously.

To answer the questions (since you won't look them up):

(1) Typically, there are a handful of solar flares (1-10) every year. The number of solar flares correlates with sunspot number, and has an 11-year cycle. The exact number of flares depends on the minimum threshold you call a "flare". You can see the correlation http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2006/21dec06/hathaway2.gif" .

(2) Typically, there are about 50 earthquakes per day. (Again, with a number depending on your minimum threshold) There is no correlation with the solar cycle.

So you have two problems - one is that there is no correlation with the 11-year cycle, and the other is that the number of earthquakes is 3 or 4 orders of magnitude larger than the number of flares, so at most flares would be causing 0.01-0.1% of them.

well don't give up on me just yet vanadium.

At the risk of repeating myself, the question I was interested in is whether any solar activity can have that kind of effect on the earth. What you have said is what I already intuitively felt but could not say on quantitative grounds.

I thought that talking about the energies involved was a more absolute way of refuting the hypothesis since there was no claim that every earthquake was caused by solar activity and also the arguments of correlation between earthquakes and solar flares are the very arguments that you find on the pseudo science sites that i mentioned at the start.

So my options were to either say that no your data is incorrect by offering my own data from a more credible source or to say that the argument is non-physical if we accept existing theories of physics.

I preferred the second because I can say solar flares cannot cause earthquakes under existing theory.

I agree if the question is about whether existing theory is correct or not then it comes down to a battle with data and perhaps you are right in jumping to that end right from the start but i wanted to keep the argument on a purely theoretical basis.

If it makes you feel any more optimistic about my career I did look at earthquake rates and solar flare rates but as I kept running into mixed data each claiming both ends,so I decided to change my approach.

 

[Ken G]

It is true that "data mining" can be a bit tricky, especially if people have an agenda. Sometimes marginal correlations are found, that are only convincing to those who already have a theoretical expectation. The problem with theoretical explanations, though, is that earthquakes aren't "caused" in the normal sense of the term-- their causes are stresses that are always there, and whether or not an earthquake happens at any moment seems to be determined by random processes, which is another way to say they are not "determined" at all. It isn't clear that you can make an earthquake happen with some subtle influence-- the influences are already there, and they are not subtle, but the earthquake takes its time anyway.

 

[holograpple]

SCIENCE WITHOUT BORDERS. Transactions of the International Academy of Science H & E.
Vol.3. 2007/2008, SWB, Innsbruck, 2008 ISBN 978-9952-451-01-6 ISSN 2070-0334

217
ABOUT POSSIBLE INFLUENCE OF SOLAR ACTIVITY UPON
SEISMIC AND VOLCANIC ACTIVITIES:
LONG-TERM FORECAST

*Khain V.E., **Khalilov E.N.
*Moscow State University named after M.V.Lomonosov,
**International Academy of Science H&E (Austria, Innsbruck)


It has been determined that in the period of solar activity increase (11-year
cycles) there increase seismic and volcanic activities in the compression zone of
Earth and at the same time there decreases the activity in the tension zones of Earth.
On the basis of the discovered stable 11-year and 22-year cyclicalities in the seismic
and volcanic activities and their high correlation with solar activity there has been
made the long-term forecast until 2018. The next maximum of seismic and volcanic
activity with very high amplitude for the compression zones of Earth is forecasted for
the period 2012-2015.

 

[Dotini]

Rumbles without sound
Auroras rain down
Magnetic fields shake
Beware the spacequake

Vortices swirl
plasma a'twirl
Richter predicts
a magnitude six

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/27jul_spacequakes/

 

[Idoubt]

Hmm... all that seems very...suggestive..

 

[Nik_2213]

Here's an easy one for you...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
This was easily the biggest geomagnetic storm in modern history.

Now you must check USGS etc to see if there's a 'spike' in 'significant' earthquakes during that ~18 hour period. There's a couple of large but lesser geomagnetic events listed, you could check them, too. Then generate several random dates when Sun was 'quiet' and check the null hypothesis...

FWIW, was there a significant reduction in quakes during 'Little Ice Age' when, for Maunder Minimum', there were scant sun-spots and very little solar activity ??

 

[leansb]

Take a look at this article with collected data about a possible correlation:
http://www.thesuntoday.org/sun-101/flares-and-earthquakes/