Guest posts by Willis Eschenbach
I came across an article with the provocative title, “Scientists link cosmic radiation to earthquakes for the first time“.
So I looked at basic research, Observing large-scale precursor correlations between cosmic rays and earthquakes with periods similar to the solar cycle by P. Homola and 43 others.
Hmmm, the authoring rule of sez I. Willis says that the strength of a scientific study is inversely proportional to the number of authors… but I digress. Summary says:
The search for a correlation between the rate of secondary cosmic ray detection and seismic effects has long been a topic of research motivated by the hope of identifying a new type of precursor that could power the system. global early warning against earthquakes.
Here, we show for the first time that the mean variation of the cosmic ray detection rate correlates with the observed global seismic activity with a time lag of about two weeks and the magnitude of the effect. The reaction changes cyclically like the sun does not decay. period, with a phase change of about three years, exceeding 6 σ at the local maximum.
The precursor characteristics of the observed correlations point to the pioneering prospect of an early warning system against earthquakes.
The study said:
Here we report an observation of the correlation between the variation of the mean rates of the secondary cosmic-ray fluxes measured by global and local seismic activity, and we also show The periodicity of these correlations (or their observability) corresponds to observations of sunspot numbers going back to the 1960s.
They describe their method as:
… an alternative, new approach we report here: compare the mean absolute variations of secondary cosmic radiation with the total global average earthquake intensity.
And their conclusion is:
We have demonstrated for the first time that the variation of the absolute mean detection rate of secondary cosmic radiation correlates with the global seismic situation (the sum of the magnitudes of earthquakes of greater than or equal to 4, occurs at all locations) occurs approximately two weeks later than the relevant cosmic ray data. The size of the time variation between the cosmological and seismic data sets indicates a precursor character of the correlation effect.
So to see if this makes sense, I went and got the data for earthquake, cosmic raysAnd smudge. You cannot perform a CEEMD or Fourier analysis unless the regular data is ordered in time or space, the earthquake data is not. So I used a variant of Fourier analysis that I invented a few years ago, only to find out that I’m not the first to invent it. Tamino informed me that “The method you describe is very clever. It is also known (at least in the astronomical literature) as the Date Compensated Discrete Fourier Transform, or DCDFT (Ferraz-Mello, S. 1981, Astron. J., 86, 619). To be fair, that proves I understand Fourier transforms… the main advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t require the data to be equally spaced.
My logic is that if the magnitude of the earthquakes is related to sunspots and cosmic rays as claimed by the 44 authors, then we should see some kind of significant ~11 year cycle in earthquake data. Here are the results of my analysis.
Figure 1. Fourier period graph of monthly sunspots, average magnitude of earthquakes, and cosmic rays. The three longest records for cosmic rays are from Thule, Greenland; Jungfraujoch, Switzerland; and Newark, NJ USA. In addition to the earthquakes of magnitude greater than 4 that the authors studied, I also considered earthquakes of magnitude greater than 4 greater intensity 7.
From the cycle chart, it is clear that there are no significant periods in earthquakes around 11 years. You can see that cosmic rays are closely connected to sunspots, for well-understood physical reasons.
But there is no such connection between sunspots or cosmic rays and earthquakes.
Does the complete lack of any significant ~11-year cycles in the earthquakes suggest that the 44 authors were wrong?
Are not. Maybe they have discovered the secret formula for connecting cosmic rays and earthquakes.
But it certainly makes their claims much less likely…
My best wishes to all of you,
w.
PS: Yeah, you’ve heard it before, you’ll hear it again. To minimize the number of misunderstandings, when you comment PLEASE quote the exact words you are discussing.
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