North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes – Science – AAAS

Commenters debated whether the North Korean test plausibly set off years of small earthquakes, citing supplemental catalogs that report hundreds to over a thousand events mostly between magnitude 1.5-2.5. Some argued those tremors are trivial and comparable to everyday bumps - one noted a magnitude 2 release equals roughly 56 kg of explosives - while others pointed to historical examples of human activity inducing quakes (oil extraction in California, gas extraction in Groningen) and said the spatial proximity and long delay make the case interesting. Several people questioned causation and how seismologists distinguish triggered events from background seismicity, and a few injected humor or mythic imagery (Godzilla, Pulgasari).

Opinion split sharply on consequences and responsibility. A minority contended that slowly releasing energy through many tiny quakes could be preferable to a single large rupture, but critics invoked logarithmic energy scaling and warned you’d need orders of magnitude more small quakes to match a large event and that perturbing one system can increase stresses elsewhere. Others raised legal, insurance and political liability concerns about intentional seismic intervention, pointed to historical programs like Project Plowshare and alleged “tectonic weapons,” and linked the debate to geopolitical arguments about nuclear deterrence and Western hypocrisy. Many closed by emphasizing that tectonics are hard to predict, so outcomes remain deeply uncertain.