
Strange earthquake waves rippled around Earth - curtis
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/11/strange-earthquake-waves-rippled-around-world-earth-geology/
======
ian0
The twitter exchanges between the geologists mentioned in the article are
great.

They talk in real life how hackers talk only in movies. Very jealous.

[https://twitter.com/matarikipax/status/1061590953876582402](https://twitter.com/matarikipax/status/1061590953876582402)

[https://twitter.com/ALomaxNet/status/1061637338709790721](https://twitter.com/ALomaxNet/status/1061637338709790721)

~~~
powvans
Googling the Mayotte Island that they tracked it to shows that a magnitude 5.0
earthquake occurred within the last hour:

[https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000hwxr...](https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us1000hwxr/executive)

~~~
brownbat
Tangent, but this place, which I knew basically nothing about before just now,
appears to be stunningly beautiful, judging from the somewhat random sample of
images on Wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayotte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayotte)

It's humbling... I feel like a bad citizen of the world for my ignorance of
Mayotte. But also optimistic... the world is full of so many amazing places,
there's always going to be some next amazing place to learn more about.

~~~
seriouspat
I lived there for 4 years and you shouldn't trust the random pictures you see
on the internet. The place is a shithole.

~~~
distances
I'd love to hear of some experiences!

~~~
maeln
Mayotte is a French oversea territory. And like almost all french oversea
territory it is very poor, but less than the average neighbor countries
leading to a lot of immigration which are difficult to control (even though
Mayotte is an Island which make it a bit more controllable than Guyana for
example). This usually end up in a increasing poverty and unemployment,
leading to criminality, aging infrastructure, and public services not being
able to handle the demand.

Like a lot of oversea territory, it has some beautiful landscape, but is
crippled by the problems above. Living there is very difficult.

EDIT: Note also that I am not blaming immigrant. The problem being that adding
more poor people in an already poor territory doesn't solve the problem of
poverty. And France unwillingness to treat its oversea territory fairly and
really invest in them is the main root of the problem.

~~~
gambiting
As it is part of France, do people there technically have EU citizenship?

~~~
raverbashing
"Fun fact" this doesn't happen to some of the UKs crown dependencies like: the
Isle of Man or Channel Islands

(though they're allegedly leaving so it won't matter too much anymore)

~~~
Retric
The UK situation with its dependencies is very complex. I found this short
video helpful:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10)

~~~
raverbashing
Yes that video is excellent. (Also: "with its dependencies")

------
mxuribe
Clearly, the wave is from movement and noise generated by a large (multi-mile
long) subterranean hard drive or processor or machine spinning to life after
having been given the "wake on LAN" (or some other SSH/RDP-like) signal from
Oumuamua [1] - who just got into wifi range earlier this year. The signal is
just too clean for it to be natural; it must be artificially generated. So,
its either aliens returning, or some Earthly code recently got deployed for
Earth 2.0. (Oh, did you think we were living in Earth 1.0...Hmmm, interesting.
Do you also think that's air that you're breathing?) ;-)

[1] =
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua)

~~~
Alex_Fragd
I have some requests I'd like to see in the next update:

1\. nerf mosquitoes 2\. are hemorrhoids even necessary? I think we can just
trash that feature. 3\. human ingestion is quite buggy. often times
nutritional data gets routed incorrectly. plz fix

~~~
mxuribe
During recent sprint retrospectives, product owner continues to battle for the
need to include hemorrhoid features, hence the constant addition of user
stories. Needless to state, none of us is a fan of this set of hemorrhoid
features...but product owner is quite, er, um, powerful. But the nerf
mosquitoes; yeah we can put that one in! For human ingestion, we'd need a
little more details for a user story there. :-)

~~~
Alex_Fragd
"For human ingestion, we'd need a little more details for a user story there.
:-)"

well, I was attempting to route some potato data to my food decompounder for
processing and it was mistakenly sent to the air intake vent. suffice to say
this disruption of the norm caused a break in workflow.

~~~
mxuribe
Thanks, this is clear now; and will be added as a user story for the next
sprint.

By the way, i figure i should caution you that I've heard other users
leveraging a temporary hack - while awaitjng this feature to be built/deployed
- of routing potato (and other such) data via other intakes. In fact i think
there was a SouthPark episode related to this hack; in that case using turkeys
as the routed data.

This was fun, thanks! lol :-)

------
samstave
This happened before, i had forgotten about it. But it was posted on some
forum, and they could track the seismic waves as they traveled from the
eastern US to the western US - and they were exceptionally fast... but the
interesting thing of when that particular event happened was that the
speculation was it was the detection of secret underground high-speed
transports, between DUMBS...

Other than it being an interesting fanciful thought to imagine if such a thing
could be, i didnt think much of it.

But this is interesting in that the waves were also tracable from seismometer
to seismometer...

Ill see if i can find it.

~~~
codeulike
_between DUMBS..._

between what?

~~~
EvilGrin
Deep Underground Military Base

~~~
robertfw
This is my new favourite conspiracy theory. Was very entertained on my morning
commute!

~~~
samstave
You should know that there was a patent filed in the late 60s for a tunnel-
boring-machine which used a nuclear reactor as its power source, but also used
the heat-output of the reactor to melt the earth surrounding the tunnel it was
boring so as to make a structurally sound tunnel

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US3693731](https://patents.google.com/patent/US3693731)

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US3885832](https://patents.google.com/patent/US3885832)

------
jrd259
I noticed in the article:

"Mayotte is on the move. Since mid-July, GPS stations on the island have
tracked it sliding more than 2.4 inches to the east and 1.2 inches to the
south."

If this isn't a mistake, it's also very interesting. 2.7 inches in four months
is very fast. That's 20 cm/year. The fastest techtonic plates move about 10
cm/year. Also this island does not appear to be near a plate boundary, so what
could make it move? The article didn't say what it was moving relative to.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sure it did - relative to the GPS coordinate system.

~~~
jhayward
Just because one uses GPS to measure position does not mean one is calculating
position in WGS84, the GPS native geodetic datum.

For instance many survey instruments use Differential GPS to obtain a more
precise location by using corrections from a receiver at a well-established
survey mark. When using DGPS the coordinate system becomes that of the
reference mark, not the GPS system.

So I think the question is relevant, and takes note of the context in which
ground motion is studied.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
But that ground point is located by GPS as well, which translates the more-
precise location relative to the ground point right back to the WGS84 frame

~~~
jhayward
No, the ground point is most often registered in either a continental or
regional plate datum.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
'Most often'? By whom?

These things are in use in the 100's of thousands in agriculture now. Such
base stations record their ground point by GPS location.

------
yosito
This was my understanding from the article; there's probably a magma chamber
shifting in some way, and resonance of pressure waves inside that chamber is
causing outward waves to be projected around the earth. The metaphor I imagine
is a boat in the middle of a lake having a sudden (non-explosive) hull breach
that causes it to fill with water and rock rhythmically side to side. As it
rocks, ripples from the boat extend outward in the lake at the same slow
frequency that the boat is rocking, eventually spreading out through the
entire lake.

~~~
cwkoss
Pardon, I know very little about fluid dynamics.

How would a hull breach cause a boat to rock rhythmically side to side?

~~~
apatheticonion
The people using buckets to scoop it out, obviously.

------
kristianov
Please don't be the military...Please don't be the military...Please don't be
the military...

~~~
peterlk
I don't like feeling like a conspiracy theorist, but those signals look really
clean [0]. Not necessarily the military, but... it's so intentional-looking.

> “They're too nice; they're too perfect to be nature,” she jokes, although
> she quickly adds that an industrial source is impossible, since no wind
> farms or drilling are taking place in the deep waters off Mayotte's shores.

And

> For now, though, the lack of data makes it tough to say more about the
> wiggly forms. Hicks' preliminary models hinted that the waves emanated from
> subsurface inflation, rather than a magma chamber draining or collapsing.
> But with a little additional data, the model flipped and pointed to chamber
> deflation instead.

Does lend a grain of salt toward the military theory.

[0]
[https://mobile.twitter.com/matarikipax/status/10615909538765...](https://mobile.twitter.com/matarikipax/status/1061590953876582402)

~~~
jerf
"“They're too nice; they're too perfect to be nature,”"

Nature does on occasion surprise us with nice clean signals; for instance, the
history of pulsars, where the initial signals were so clean that people
couldn't help but suspect they were artificial (and I do not mock them for
that, it was a reasonable thing to put on the initial pile of theories):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar#History_of_observation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar#History_of_observation)

The universe is still low-entropy, and will remain so for the forseeable
future. Things like this can still naturally happen.

------
gscott
I wonder as polar ice melts and the weight distribution on earth changes
because of it if the planet wouldn't twist a little bit while spinning and
cause earthquakes, even if just small ones.

~~~
pasta
Yes I also think a lot of things will happen, because of the climate change,
that we never experienced before.

We know a lot of world wide events happened in history, so it also unlikely we
never will experience huge events in the (near) future.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Any chance that magnetic field flips are related to climate changes in the
past?

~~~
pasta
Yes this could be the case:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal)

Edit: by the way, I don't think humans should speed up climate change... but
there also will be a lot of changes we can't control.

------
thasaleni
I'm imagine a dragon that has been sleeping beneath the sea for hundred years
just woke up, and nothing is gonna change my mind

~~~
gnoack
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

~~~
TeMPOraL
That was just Cthulhu snoring. When He wakes up, seismometers will start
spelling words in ancient alphabets.

~~~
Sharlin
And just looking at the output is enough to drive you mad.

------
dimnsionofsound
The abstract on this [1] makes me think something similar could be happening
here: low attenuation implies the resonance would take quite a number of
cycles to die out like the one discussed in the article.

Here’s another abstract [2] describing resonance with periods near 10 seconds
lasting a long time.

[1]:
[https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/1999...](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/1999GL005352)

[2]:
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/299/5615/2058](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/299/5615/2058)

------
warent
I have essentially zero knowledge of how all this stuff works but I wonder if
this is from something going on much deeper in the Earth, like perhaps the
very core itself just gurgled on a chunk of Earth that fell in or something.

~~~
CardenB
The bottom of the article is “99.9% just noise and 0.1% it’s something” and
says no one knows. Sounds like not a very big article

~~~
vorticalbox
This is a quote from someone on the investigation not the author of the
article.

You should read it all, it's a somewhat interesting read.

------
jhayward
> _“They 're too nice; they're too perfect to be nature,” she jokes, although
> she quickly adds that an industrial source is impossible, since no wind
> farms or drilling are taking place in the deep waters off Mayotte's shores._

Today I learned that seismologists have to take in to account wind farms when
filtering noise.

------
bhingque
I just TODAY finished Nemisin's Broken Earth series.

~~~
lioeters
Tracked down this reference to: N. K. Jemisin - the first in the series being
The Fifth Season, winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel 2016. Thanks for the
reading tip!

------
hindsightbias
Ever since Oumuamua went thru, I've been thinking of Greg Bear's Forge of God.

Aliens spike the earth with a binary matter-antimatter neutronium weapon. They
orbit the core for awhile...

------
dghughes
I wonder if it has to do with activity in the Great Rift Valley to the
northwest? A continent being split in two must cause some odd behavior for an
entire region.

------
rasz
there we go [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alaska-earthquake-today-
anchora...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alaska-earthquake-today-anchorage-
tsunami-alert-issued-live-updates/)

------
EngineerBetter
It's clearly the Forerunner portal to the Ark waking up.

------
arthurcolle
I wonder what the US Navy is testing!

~~~
flukus
The French Navy starting another round of nuclear testing might be more likely
for this one, it's only 20 years since their last ones.

We should get greenpeace to send the Rainbow Warrior III over.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Not a nuclear test because there's no initial transient.

This is more like a forced resonance - the geological equivalent of an organ
pipe.

So I'd guess there's a pipe-like feature or a chamber in the area (an old
magma tunnel? - it doesn't have to be empty, it just needs to have a constant
density significantly different to its surroundings) and "noise" from moving
magma made it to ring.

With a 17s period and 6km/s velocity, for lambda/4 resonance the pipe/chamber
would be around 30km long - which looks not-completely-insanely-wrong,
possibly.

------
BenjaminBlair
If it was in the Pacific I'd say it's Cthulhu rising.

------
ajbetteridge
The comments here so far are one reason I prefer HN. If this was reddit the
first post undoubtedly would have been a meme pic with the phrase "Aliens!!"
:)

~~~
gnulinux
This thread so far has a sleeping dragon and bunch of Cthulhus.

------
fithisux
Why strange?

If the theory cannot explain it, then fixit :-)

