Comment by shoobiedoo
16 hours ago
Fukuoka here (about 100km from Kumamoto) and definitely felt it, so it must have been a real big one in Kumamoto itself.
My friend was driving home from work closer to Miyazaki and didn't feel the quake, but had huge hailstones hitting his car. There's a rapture going on or something
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I’m genuinely asking here - is climate change thought to have influence on earthquakes? I wouldn’t have expected so, but maybe there are some non-obvious pathways for it to be the case?
In theory - maybe - melting of glaciers and polar icecaps could be a factor - but not everywhere:
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-climate-chang... - https://www.weforum.org/stories/climate-action/climate-chang...
(Thinking that perhaps the hailstones were what the original commenter was referring too - although, perhaps the gods are just unhappy with the state of the world overall - this isn't the first big earthquake this year, huge numbers of forest fires, record heat levels...)
I have a vivid recollection of a crotchety old man in Southern California telling me “yup, this is earthquake weather” on a hot, clear day. (There wasn’t an earthquake that day.) It was so bizarre and disconnected from science that it was burned into my mind. Thanks for unlocking that memory.
That being said, there is some redistribution of tectonic weight that may happen due to entire ice caps melting… that has the potential to trigger movement.
I just find it lazy to continuously use climate change (one which we aren't allowed to offer or discuss any alternative theories) to explain away everything. It fits the pattern of late, recently from a certain political movement.
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