Can Tropical Cyclones Cause Earthquakes? I Think It's Worth Discussing Considering What Just Happened In Haiti

[turtlehurricane]

I know a lot of you have probably thought of this, cause it seems like these events happened too close together to be a coincidence. Therefore, I'd like to start a scientific discussion in this thread, about how Tropical Cyclones can potentially cause Earthquakes, and in this particular case, it seems possible that Tropical Storm Fred caused an earthquake in Haiti. 

Haiti did get a tremendous amount of rain in Fred from Wednesday-Thursday, and on Saturday the Earthquake happened, a mere 2 days later: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000f65h

Maybe the flooding rain and mud/land slides caused something to shift enough to spark a huge earthquake? 

[WEATHER53]

I believe earthquakes and their effect deep down in oceans are instrumental in the increase of ocean temps.  

[LongBeachSurfFreak]

3 hours ago, turtlehurricane said:

I know a lot of you have probably thought of this, cause it seems like these events happened too close together to be a coincidence. Therefore, I'd like to start a scientific discussion in this thread, about how Tropical Cyclones can potentially cause Earthquakes, and in this particular case, it seems possible that Tropical Storm Fred caused an earthquake in Haiti. 

Haiti did get a tremendous amount of rain in Fred from Wednesday-Thursday, and on Saturday the Earthquake happened, a mere 2 days later: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000f65h

Maybe the flooding rain and mud/land slides caused something to shift enough to spark a huge earthquake? 

Considering earthquakes occur miles below the surface I would think it’s just a coincidence.
fracking can cause earthquakes but they are much closer to the surface.   

[cptcatz]

Haiti is very prone to earthquakes and to tropical cyclones. Eventually you'll get them occurring close together. I can't see how one would cause the other to happen. 

[SnowenOutThere]

I have read a book that had a section on this years ago can't remember it but it shows that this has happened in different places before. I think the book said how maybe the large amount of rain and flooding can put stress on faults leading to a slightly higher chance of earthquakes. 

[Prospero]

On a scientific level that is a very complicated question.

• How close was the trigger that set off the earthquake?
  Was some extra weight and imbalance on the surface enough to do it?
• How deep does the Earth feel air pressure changes?
  Does the ground breath and expand with the air?
  If so, how deep does it go?
• Does the moon and tide have an impact on the Earth's crust as well?
  Did the moon's gravity tug at some molten mantle?
• Did me dropping a paver block in my backyard the other day create a ripple that vibrated to Haiti?

I tend to believe that everything is connected to everything else on some level. Anything that happens anywhere is related to everything that happens everywhere else.

Just the way I think...

[TheDreamTraveler]

Yeah if you google around there's a lot of other places that have studied if there's a link between hurricanes and earthquakes and believe there might be. Haiti is in a prone earthquake area so it might be more sensitive to outside influences like hurricanes

[Ed, snow and hurricane fan]

1 hour ago, LongBeachSurfFreak said:

Considering earthquakes occur miles below the surface I would think it’s just a coincidence.
fracking can cause earthquakes but they are much closer to the surface.   

Fracking and salt water disposal can cause small earthquakes, generally 10,000 to 100,000 times weaker than the Haiti earthquake.  (Log scale).  I think Haiti was about 12 km below the surface, far deeper than the phreatic water zone.  Changes in tides or sea level pressure, who knows if that might move them a few days earlier, but the Caribbean plate is volcanically active in the Lesser Antilles, and seismically active in the Greater Antilles.

[Prospero]

A topic that has come up this season has been the storm activity in EPAC and how it affects the Atlantic storms. I'm sure it was not that long ago in meteorological history when that concept would be laughed out of the room.

Good grief, it was like yesterday that people thought the sun went around the Earth which was flat.

I remember a legend where the Grateful Dead were playing "Fire on the Mountain" when Mt. St. Helen's blew up. And everybody who knows the Grateful Dead knows that Phil's bass beat will shake up the Earth.

[Ed, snow and hurricane fan]

37 minutes ago, Prospero said:

A topic that has come up this season has been the storm activity in EPAC and how it affects the Atlantic storms. I'm sure it was not that long ago in meteorological history when that concept would be laughed out of the room.

Good grief, it was like yesterday that people thought the sun went around the Earth which was flat.

I remember a legend where the Grateful Dead were playing "Fire on the Mountain" when Mt. St. Helen's blew up. And everybody who knows the Grateful Dead knows that Phil's bass beat will shake up the Earth.

St. Patrick's Day, 1988, the Dead at the Kaiser in Oakland.  I can neither confirm nor deny mind altering substances ingested.  Not much more than a year later, the 880 freeway, how we got from Alameda to Berkeley, collapsed in an earthquake.

[Prospero]

Just now, Ed, snow and hurricane fan said:

St. Patrick's Day, 1988, the Dead at the Kaiser in Oakland.  I can neither confirm nor deny mind altering substances ingested.  Not much more than a year later, the 880 freeway, how we got from Alameda to Berkeley, collapsed in an earthquake.

I was there, little green bottles going around. Great Sugaree! (I have a CD from a .flac download.)

Saw them in Philly the night after the earthquake and we didn't know if they'd make, but they did. Opened with Shakedown Street.

[Ed, snow and hurricane fan]

4 minutes ago, Prospero said:

I was there, little green bottles going around. Great Sugaree! (I have a CD from a .flac download.)

Saw them in Philly the night after the earthquake and we didn't know if they'd make, but they did. Opened with Shakedown Street.

Jammed the Beatle's 'Hey Jude', and every drum was miked to a different speaker, the drums circled the auditorium.  Opened with 'Hell in a Bucket', that was, I think, the latest album.

 

[Prospero]

10 minutes ago, Ed, snow and hurricane fan said:

Jammed the Beatle's 'Hey Jude', and every drum was miked to a different speaker, the drums circled the auditorium.  Opened with 'Hell in a Bucket', that was, I think, the latest album.

 

Loved the Kaiser, a great venue. Yea Hey Jude was a real treat, right out of Dear Mr Fantasy!

Take a listen:

https://archive.org/details/gd88-03-17.sbd.samaritano.21297.sbeok.shnf/gd1988-03-17d2t10.shn

Got goose pimples just now listenting. Fun show. I accidentally did WAY too much. LOL

[Ed, snow and hurricane fan]

We've been to the same Dead show?  The odds in a country of 300 million people...

 

OT- HWRF has a lot of company on the forecast track somewhere from the Rio Grande down to Veracruz, but the intensity is a lot higher than any model except NNIC, which is a consensus model, and HWRF is one of the inputs.

 

The inputs to NNIC include intensity forecasts from 4 deterministic intensity models (HWFI, AVNI, DSHP, LGEM) and 4 other predictors.

The model input includes 5 predictors as follows:

(1) the mean intensity from the 4 models,
(2)-(5) The deviation of each model from the mean.

The four other inputs include the following:

(6) The previous 12 hr intensity change (t=0 minus t=-12h max wind)
(7) The latitude along the OFCI track
(8) The SST along the OFCI track,
(9) The 850-200 hPa shear along the OFCI track

[Prospero]

14 minutes ago, Ed, snow and hurricane fan said:

We've been to the same Dead show?  The odds in a country of 300 million people...

You are the first person I've run into who was at that show.

We took Amtrack from Winter Park, CO to Oakland because there was a blizzard coming through. I remember the train inching along at about 10 mph in Nevada because it was something below zero and the track switches were frozen so the train had to go soooo slow. Cars on the icy roads seem to fly past us. Then there was snow over 10 feet deep on Donner's Pass. Oh the green grass at the Kaiser and SF Bay area weather for us mountain people was amazing after six months buried in snow in the Colorado Ski areas (Steamboat Springs was our base).

Fun three shows, Mardi Gras night as well.

But yea, 880 that we were on around Oakland once we got there pancaked in the earthquake. Scary. We all were shocked when that happened.

Glad Phil's bass didn't trigger the earthquake when we were there. (Coming back around to on-topic...)

 

[Tezeta]

The dead sucked. Jerry was a heroin addict, Bobby can’t sing, Phil is a shill for the liver industrial complex, everyone hated Donna, pigpen was selfish and destructive, etc etc. 

 

[jpbart]

6 hours ago, turtlehurricane said:

I know a lot of you have probably thought of this, cause it seems like these events happened too close together to be a coincidence. Therefore, I'd like to start a scientific discussion in this thread, about how Tropical Cyclones can potentially cause Earthquakes, and in this particular case, it seems possible that Tropical Storm Fred caused an earthquake in Haiti. 

Haiti did get a tremendous amount of rain in Fred from Wednesday-Thursday, and on Saturday the Earthquake happened, a mere 2 days later: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000f65h

Maybe the flooding rain and mud/land slides caused something to shift enough to spark a huge earthquake? 

The short answer is no.   I have a Ph.D. In geology, and these two events are not directly related.   Earthquakes caused by fracking, excess rain, landslides etc would be small, shallow and highly localized.  The Haiti quake was really large and deep.  So small shallow quakes can happen due to heavy rain etc. but the monster in Haiti was due to tectonic forces and was going to happen storm or no.   Any pattern in storm and this type earthquake occurrence is coincidental.  

[Prospero]

37 minutes ago, Tezeta said:

The dead sucked. Jerry was a heroin addict, Bobby can’t sing, Phil is a shill for the liver industrial complex, everyone hated Donna, pigpen was selfish and destructive, etc etc. 

 

You know a lot for a hater! LOL

Jerry said the Grateful Dead was like licorice. "Some people hate licorice, but people who like licorice, really like licorice."

I have tickets to Dead and Company this October, can't wait!

[Tezeta]

1 minute ago, Prospero said:

You know a lot for a hater! LOL

Jerry said the Grateful Dead was like licorice. "Some people hate licorice, but people who like licorice, really like licorice."

I have tickets to Dead and Company this October, can't wait!

Now John Mayer is a real musician. Props to him. 

[Prospero]

2 minutes ago, Tezeta said:

Now John Mayer is a real musician. Props to him. 

Filling Jerry's shoes better than anyone else could. Jerry fumbling a note or two, or forgetting where he was in a song (Telluride '87 comes to mind) was just a part of old Grateful Dead reality and we accepted it. John is young, hopefully stays clean, and a joy to hear and watch tickle the strings.

[SnowenOutThere]

1 hour ago, jpbart said:

The short answer is no.   I have a Ph.D. In geology, and these two events are not directly related.   Earthquakes caused by fracking, excess rain, landslides etc would be small, shallow and highly localized.  The Haiti quake was really large and deep.  So small shallow quakes can happen due to heavy rain etc. but the monster in Haiti was due to tectonic forces and was going to happen storm or no.   Any pattern in storm and this type earthquake occurrence is coincidental.  

Ok makes sense but what about air pressure? That happens on a large enough scale where I would assume it has some effect, maybe if a fault is already about to go off in a year or two but a sudden change in air pressure happens it can cause that release to happen soon after the change in air pressure. 

[jpbart]

I read those, mostly innuendo and fluff.  Small events on the surface (hurricanes are tiny on a planet scale) might cause small shallow eq’s, maybe, Haiti, no.  Listen I get it, the coincidence seems odd but that is all it is.  I am not disparaging your curiosity.  It was an excellent question to ask. Being a weather noob, it was nice to be able to respond intelligently for once. 
 

no to air pressure but that another good question.  The forces and masses of the objects involved are truly massive.  I mean how much does tectonic plate weigh?  I could look it up but its a lot and the forces involved are huge.  So things on the surface that seem impressive to us are tiny and generally insignificant to tectonic plates. Air pressure changes are too small to kick one off. 
 

oh and I like the dead, not as my wife does but I like them.  I am building up my vinyl collection and American Beauty the first dead LP on my list.   

[WEATHER53]

The one that made the huge wave that swallowed that island right before Christmas about 10 years ago. Isn’t that the biggest  in a while? 

[Amped]

Short answer no.

However lots of rain can will increase the odds of mudslides/landslides triggered by the earthquake.  I'm guessing ground with higher water content is more likely to liquefy during the quake as well.

[Prospero]

Fact: The Haiti earthquake was going to happen no matter what at some point. Earthquakes will always happen as the Earth's crust moves.

Fact: Hurricanes happen no matter what.

Fact: There will always be coincidences of all kinds just by mathematical chance. Coincidences do happen.

Fact: No scientific knowledge is ever complete, and it is a flaw in thinking to assume anything else. We learn new things and discoveries are made continually. What we once knew to be a fact, often turns out to be false.

Can a hurricane have influence on the timing of an earthquake? Let's ask again in 100 years.