More Earthquakes for Dummies

Seismic signature of a nuclear test

We do so love to come across new sources of internet stupidification here at the Antisocial Network, so it's with great pleasure... well, not pleasure per se... that we introduce our readers to the website named UniverseToday.com. Why Jerry Coffey pounded out the post he called, "What are the Different Types of Earthquakes?" for this particular website, we have no idea; except that apparently at the time the site didn't style itself as "Space and astronomy news." Whatever the case, Jerry's training as a registered nurse didn't seem to lend itself well to the topic at hand.

Coffey apparently didn't do much research either, since he opened by misinforming his readers that,

"There are two main types of earthquakes: natural and man-made. Naturally occurring(tectonic) [sic] earthquakes occur along tectonic plate lines(fault lines)[sic]  while man-made earthquakes are always related to explosions detonated by man."

Most of what he said, to be polite, is utter bushwa. Geophysicists (the people who study this stuff) say that there are four types of earthquakes: tectonic, volcanic, collapse, and explosion. If you add that to anthropogenic (man-made), that makes five types.
Grammatical problems (which seem to be the site's, not Jerry's) aside, Coffey is mistaken for a couple of reasons:

• Tectonic plate boundaries (not "lines") are not necessarily faults. Faults are not always associated with plate boundaries, either.
• There are lots of man-made earthquakes, mostly related to subsurface injections... not fracking, just disposal of the water used for fracking.

Moving right along, Jerry has other problems as well, including his claims that,

"Tectonic earthquakes will occur anywhere there is sufficient stored elastic strain energy to drive fracture propagation along a fault plane. Plate boundaries move past each other smoothly and aseismically if there are no irregularities or asperities along the boundary that increase the frictional resistance; however, most boundaries do have such asperities that lead to stick-slip behavior."

While plagiarizing this paragraph, Coffey left out one little detail: the original was speaking only of transform faults. That certainly renders his discussion of tectonic earthquakes lacking, eh? We won't bother with the rest of the material Jerry parroted (from Wikipedia?), just with his final statement: "The other type of earthquake is the artificial or man-made quake. This type of quake has been felt all over the world after the detonation of a nuclear weapon. There is very little actual data that is readily available on this type of quake, but, of the two types of of [sic] earthquakes it is the only type that can be easily predicted and controlled."

We didn't look, but we figure Jerry wrote this himself – for a couple of reasons. First, there's that "felt all over the world" crap, and second, there's the bull about "easily predicted and controlled." Yeah, sure... we'll let Coffey head out to a nuclear test side in North Korea and see if he can "control" the seismicity of a subsurface nuclear test...

With bullshit like this, it's no secret that we'll be looking for more rubbish from Mr. Coffey's keyboard as we search for more Dumbass of the Day nominees.

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