Is it Possible to Create Artificial Earthquakes?

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The (purely hypothetical) “tectonic weapon” would be an artificially induced earthquake.

There is little or no reason to expect such a weapon will ever prove useful, or perhaps even possible to anyone.

Underground nuclear explosions make the ground shake, but that is a fantastically inefficient way to employ the released energy for destructive purposes.

The idea of a tectonic weapon is to release a far greater amount of energy by triggering the release of energy stored as strain within, or between continental plates (i.e. in a fault zone).

The fundamental problem with this idea is that it requires:

• a fault zone to be close to the breaking point, so that it can be triggered;
• access to the fault zone so that you can place a suitable trigger;
• being able to place the trigger at an effective location in the fault zone (likely to be kilometres below ground)
• knowing as an engineering fact that the fault zone is close to the breaking point;
• knowing where along the fault zone a trigger might be effective.

All of these criteria (and few others, probably) must be satisfied, but in the real world none of them will be.

We can make statistical estimates of a given fault zone breaking within some period of time (usually over decades or centuries) given a detailed history of the zone, but we cannot tell by looking at any fault zone whether it is close to rupture through observation since it is a very large feature (hundreds of kilometres in extent if significantly destructive) and it is impossible to characterize the strain and strength for the entire structure, even if we could access it directly, and we can’t since it is deeply buried.

But without that information it is impossible to tell how close to rupture it is, where it is weakest, and how much energy would be needed to break it.

You may be aware that we cannot now predict earthquakes.

Reliable earthquake prediction is a necessary, but not sufficient, prerequisite for being able to use tectonic activity as a weapon.