There's a lot of people in this thread who see "North Korea" and "nuclear test" and get fired up but would otherwise shrug if it were instead, say, "Oklahoma" and "fracking".

The supplemental information is available and says: > Our earthquake catalog consists primarily of small events with magnitudes of < 2.0 and there were 1399 of them.

The cited Ren&al says: > The magnitudes of these seismic events primarily range from 1.5 to 2.5 and that there were 647 of them.

USGS (https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/earthquake-and-energy-comp...) says that a magnitude 2.0 earthquake is the equivalent energy of 56kg of explosives, which is more than I'd want to be around but I think for people who actually use the stuff it's not a lot.

Could this be considered a good thing?

The energy being released in these many tiny earthquakes was always going to exist in this location. Much better to release it slowly via thousands of tiny earthquakes than all at once. Better to have 10k magnitude 3 quakes than one magnitude 7.

This article does a very poor job of differentiating earthquakes people feel and care about versus magnitude 2 quakes that are like your neighbor dropping a book upstairs.

How long until someone attempts to diffuse a pent up fault line via nuclear geoengineering?

Reminds me of a display at Chabot in the bay area. A bubbling volcano covered by a stable mass stays bubbling underneath, but shaking up the mass gives little bubbles a bath up and they break way for the big bubbles leading to a volcanic eruption. If you fragment a he soil at some point in the mantle of earth and there is pressure anywhere below, you could get yourself a new volcano.

The long delay is the interesting part to me. How do they distinguish earthquakes triggered by the test from normal background seismicity?

Curious how we never get articles about the harm caused by western countries nuclear tests...

Is this safer overall? Should we give kids a day off from school and detonate a midsized nuclear device near Los Gatos?

Basically, they gave their land Atrial Fibrillation through strong extrasystoles.

It isn't geological destabilization. They've awakened Godzilla.

I always wondered where and how my country would test nukes if it developed them. Basically there is an expectation that you have to explode at least one.

It was much easier in colonial times when everyone owned a desert or remote island

20 km isn't that far away but still shocking. (No pun intended.)

So does that mean the Korean Peninsula is no longer a geologically safe region from earthquakes going forward? That's scary.

Endless captcha loop for me, is there an archive? (archive.ph etc. has the same issue for me)

If you keep tickling the lamp.. dont be surprised when the genie pops out.

Or better put:

Fuck with pachamama.. and she will have the last laugh

People are critical of North Korea - very understandable since the Juche ideology is absolute rubbish nonsense and North Korea remains hostile to South Korea. However had, with the USA becoming a rogue country now, I think it is time that many more countries will need a small, defensive nuclear arsenal: South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Canada, the whole EU (that is, all EU members need protection on their own; the USA can not be trusted anymore, Trump made that clear while serving Putin as agent Krasnov).

One can say that more nukes are bad; that's true. However had, the big old countries CONSTANTLY abuse smaller countries. This happens again and again and again. So, since they don't stop their own nuclear abuse and blackmail, the only response that is logical is to more fairly distribute nukes. Of course a much better option would be for all countries to give up nukes; perhaps that will happen one day in the future though probably not, since when one refuses, others would have to follow suit and also get nukes. So the only viable long-term strategy is to have nukes, while also working much harder to improve diplomacy.

imagine the decades of quakes US will set off with the bunker buster they are now developing for Pickaxe Mountain (Iran, solid granite rock, one mile deep)

billions more drained from our economy and I bet the irony is it will be nuclear somehow

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That headline is tabloid tier bs. They haven't established anything close to causation. Do better, science.org.