Can Rivers Cause Earthquakes?

[Oxytropidoceras]

Can Rivers Cause Earthquakes?

If so, it could help explain some quakes that happen

far from tectonic-plate boundaries, 

By Charlie Shobe, Scientific American, Dec. 18, 2018

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/can-rivers-cause-earthquakes/

 

Rivers can cause earthquakes, geologists claim

By Brooks Hays, UPI

https://www.upi.com/Rivers-can-cause-earthquakes-geologists-claim/5161545400911/

 

UK Researcher Suggests Rivers May Cause Earthquakes

By Jenny Wells, University of Kentucky, Dec. 21, 2018

https://uknow.uky.edu/research/uk-researcher-suggests-rivers-may-cause-earthquakes

 

The paper is:

 

Gallen, S.F. and Thigpen, J.R., 2018. Lithologic Controls 

on Focused Erosion and Intraplate Earthquakes in the 

Eastern Tennessee Seismic Zone. Geophysical Research 

Letters, 45(18), pp.9569-9578.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327600717_Lithologic_Controls_on_Focused_Erosion_and_Intraplate_Earthquakes_in_the_Eastern_Tennessee_Seismic_Zone

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ryan_Thigpen

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018GL079157

 

Yours,

 

Paul H.

[Tidgy's Dad]

Hmmm.

Interesting. 

And sheep's bladders can be employed to prevent them. 

[Innocentx]

Apparently the conditions for weight change induced earthquakes will only be increasing as glaciers melt.

 

https://www.thoughtco.com/melting-glaciers-trigger-earthquakes-1203842

 

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/04/28/the-tectonic-volcanic-events-that-will-accompany-the-melting-of-the-ice-sheets-an-overview/

[facehugger]

I didn't make it far in geology, but most quakes are caused by strike-slip faults if I recall. Parallel motion in opposite directions, potential energy builds, until it is eventually released in the form of a quake. More energy produced, more severe the quake. 

 

This new river theory seems pretty interesting, with erosion causing stability weakness?

 

[REW01]

On 1/14/2019 at 3:32 PM, facehugger said:

I didn't make it far in geology, but most quakes are caused by strike-slip faults if I recall. Parallel motion in opposite directions, potential energy builds, until it is eventually released in the form of a quake. More energy produced, more severe the quake. 

 

This new river theory seems pretty interesting, with erosion causing stability weakness?

 

One of the most well known faults in the U.S. is the San Andreas, a transform boundary forming a strike-slip fault. That doesn't mean every fault is the same, however. There exist other types of faults: normal/reverse dip-slip, oblique-slip, and scissor faults, among others. You may have also heard of a (over)thrust fault, which is simply a type of reverse fault (typically shallow dip, though they can be rotated to steep angles) where the hanging wall moves up relative to the footwall and older rocks are often placed above younger. Quakes also occur in subduction zones along the subducting plate down into the mantle and at divergent plate boundaries. But I digress...

 

You are right that, in essence, faults at boundaries cause quakes by sudden release of built stresses on the plates which could be compressional, extensional, etc. Essentially, wherever you have a boundary, you can have quakes but they don't all behave the same way.

 

This new theory actually makes a lot of sense to me for intraplate quakes. There are multiple orogenic thrust-fold belts in North America where the continental crust was deformed in a number of mountain building events (e.g. shallow angle subduction w/ the Laramide Orogeny, earlier collision with Africa, etc.). Such a tectonic event produces faulting and heavy stresses on the rock of the crust in question. Rapid erosion of sediments from these already weakened rocks via rivers could disrupt the dynamic equilibrium of a continental region across a relatively short period of time. Thus producing intraplate earthquakes when this allows for renewed movement in the preexisting faults created in past orogenic events. That's my take on it anyway, from reading the articles and the abstract of the paper.

 

Interesting stuff!