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Gravitational wave detectors could provide advance notice of seismic waves caused by powerful earthquakes (magnitude 8.5 and greater), allowing a little more time for people to evacuate (particularly at coastal regions that may be endangered by a tsunami):
Gravity signals that race through the ground at the speed of light could help seismologists get a better handle on the size of large, devastating quakes soon after they hit, a study suggests. The tiny changes in Earth's gravitational field, created when the ground shifts, arrive at seismic-monitoring stations well before seismic waves.
"The good thing we can do with these signals is have quick information on the magnitude of the quake," says Martin Vallée, a seismologist at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics.
Seismometers in China and South Korea picked up gravity signals immediately after the magnitude-9.1 Tohoku earthquake that devastated parts of Japan in 2011, Vallée and his colleagues report in Science on December 1. The signals appear as tiny accelerations on seismic-recording equipment, more than a minute before the seismic waves show up.
Observations and modeling of the elastogravity signals preceding direct seismic waves (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao0746) (DX)
Related: First Joint Detection of Gravitational Waves by LIGO and Virgo
The Nobel Physics Prize Has Been Awarded to 3 Scientists for Discoveries in Gravitational Waves
"Kilonova" Observed Using Gravitational Waves, Sparking Era of "Multimessenger Astrophysics"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @07:20AM (7 children)
If you ever want another penny for science funding, give proof that gravitational waves can improve high frequency trading.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 05 2017, @07:34AM
No delays in propagation, no screening by other masses, fastest speed between two points, make the spacetime work for you and squeeze it to the max.
Need black holes or catastrophic falls to function: on the stock market, those are so common and/or so easy to engineer that you'll never run out of bandwidth capacity.
Now, that's such a bleeding edge tech, I'll have to ask you to sign a NDA before examining your investment proposal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Tuesday December 05 2017, @11:39AM (1 child)
Detect earthquake, buy construction stocks?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:08PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:20PM (3 children)
Two things to note. First, this actually is a possible future improvement for HFT - it's not just a throwaway comment. If one can communicate through the Earth at the speed of light (in vacuum) then that's 20 ms faster than any speed of light path around the Earth (much less the current communication delay around Earth which is both longer path and slower than speed of light in vacuum). But I guess credible valuable technology spinoffs from HFT (which for example could include better tsunami warnings from large earthquakes in this hypothetical example) run counter to the narrative.
Second, there are vast sums spent in science funding. There's no point to pretending that anyone is being miserly with that. If it's not doing the job you expect it to do, then maybe you ought to look at the efficiency of the projects being funded rather than ignorantly demand more money. But that again runs counter to the narrative.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:46PM (2 children)
If you compare science funding to military funding you'll see we are being miserly with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:40PM
Just the most obvious here: earthquake research relies on military navigation satellites.
Then computers, the internet...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 06 2017, @06:53AM
Ok, what makes you think that? The consequences of an inadequate military are far more dire than the consequences of inadequate public funding of scientific research. In addition, the latter can always be funded by the private world when the public one fails to provide. It's also worth noting here that more was spend on R&D [fas.org] in 2015 than was spend on military spending [nationalpriorities.org].
versus
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:14AM (1 child)
https://www.dutchsinse.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/dutchsinse/videos .
I say "remarkable accuracy" because according to the USGS predicting earthquakes is impossible, so any accuracy at all would be better than expected. Well, I say "according to the USGS", but in the last year, the USGS has removed the "predicting earthquakes is impossible" line from their website, something which dutchsince is claiming some responsibility for. They're no friends, the USGS has put him and his channel on an official "Fake News" list.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:24PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @11:54AM (6 children)
Since when has gravity decided to obey speed limits? I recall several arguments making the case that the effects of gravity are instantaneous. Then again, these same effects were likely given by someone who thinks 95%+ of the mass of the universe is explained by "dark matter"...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:01PM (2 children)
If it was instantaneous, then pointing telescopes at that recent neutron star collision "kilonova" (which was 130 million light years away) would have been pointless. Gravitational waves clearly obey the speed limit.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @02:27AM (1 child)
Consider the source, people!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:13AM
The source of that comment was an Anonymous Coward. So what do I learn from that?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Virindi on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:01PM
Since shortly after the universe was created! Clearly.
But it was shown by experiment that gravity propagates at the speed of light in 2003. This result was predicted by general relativity 100 years ago.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3232-first-speed-of-gravity-measurement-revealed/ [newscientist.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by Pino P on Tuesday December 05 2017, @05:07PM
Why wouldn't the speed of heavy equal the speed of light?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:07AM
Yet another case where an attempted attack on science only reveals the attacker's lack of knowledge …
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:48PM (4 children)
So they can detect earthquakes a minute faster with this technique? But they still can't predict it, only detect it once it happens. So...does it really matter? If you could detect the earthquake just one minute BEFORE it starts, that would be kinda useful, because you could send a text alert and give people at least a couple seconds to try to get somewhere relatively safe. But if you're just detecting it already in progress, all you're going to do at that point is send in the emergency responders, and I don't see how one minute improvement is going to help much there. The ones in the area already know what's going on, and anyone you send in from outside is going to need some time to coordinate and just determine if they're needed at all. I wouldn't expect that to have a response time measured in minutes...so how much of an improvement is one extra minute?
Then again, living in the northeast US I don't know much about earthquakes, so maybe I'm missing something? :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @02:57AM (2 children)
The way a seismograph is normally used is to detect seismic waves. The Tōhoku earthquake and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake both happened offshore, where it isn't convenient to place seismographs. Also, earthquakes often happen deep within the Earth's crust. Seismic waves travel at 2 to 8 km/s; it takes time for them to reach the detectors. Any warning that is available "before the seismic waves show up" is useful. People can shelter, start to leave tsunami-prone areas, begin shutting down refineries and nuclear plants, break trains, etc.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:31AM (1 child)
This caused the Fukushima disaster.
Power at the site arrives via: nuclear generation, emergency diesel, and power lines
Power at the site is needed for: running water pumps to prevent a meltdown
When you "shut down" the plant, it continues to generate enough heat for a meltdown but not enough to run the turbines for power generation. Restarting within the same day isn't a safe option due to Xenon in the fuel rods; it slows the reaction but suddenly gets lost if the temperature rises, causing the reaction to get out of control.
So as soon as you shut down, you come to depend on power from the power line and/or the emergency diesel. Both were wiped out by a tsunami. Had they not shut down, they could have just kept running.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @12:19AM
I was thinking of a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA). A severe earthquake could cause a reactor vessel to crack. That may have happened at Fukushima Daiichi. A severe earthquake could also deform or dislodge reactor components so that the control rods could no longer be inserted (if I'm not mistaken, they were successfully inserted at Fukushima--and one reactor which melted down had been shut down days before the disaster). If you expect those things to happen, wouldn't you want to insert the control rods before the seismic waves arrive, to at least bring the reactor to a subcritical condition? Or perhaps, depending on the design, you could count on having a negative void coefficient so criticality would end as your coolant boiled off.
Instead of shutting down, another response to an early earthquake warning could be to attempt to start the backup generators.
Your suggestion to keep a reactor running normally during an earthquake is an interesting one, but it isn't commonly accepted, is it? I'm guessing that, had they done it at Fukushima, the result might have been one reactor (the one with the cracked reactor vessel) might have had a more severe melt-down, but the other two might have been saved.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Wednesday December 06 2017, @06:57AM
A minute is more than enough to shut down natural gas pipelines and nuclear plants, prepare an ongoing medical surgery for a big earthquake, or drive an emergency vehicle to a safer location.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @03:27AM
Always with the negative waves...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by jasnw on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:44AM
So, it takes incredibly high-precision specially-designed instruments to find gravitational wave signals from the collision of two black holes, and yet a couple of standard run-of-the-mill seismometers picked up gravitational waves from an earthquake? Why do I have a real hard time putting any faith in this analysis? My experience is that the earthquake precursor crowd is a largely a bunch of snake-oil types. My research field is ionospheric physics, and there is an ongoing battle between these 'oh look, there's an earthquake precursor' types looking at all kinds of ionospheric measurements and seeing precursors everywhere and people who know the limits of those measurements. Dig down deep enough, and it's people looking to keep their research funding alive or to tap into another source after the agency they've been fleecing catches on to their shenanigans.