Is it possible to manually trigger an earthquake?

Question

And if so how would one go about performing such an action?

And how high would it register on the Richter Scale?

Answer 1

YES IT IS.

If you detonate nuclear weapons in a fault line, you will trigger an earthquake. especially if the landmass is in danger of shifting anyway.

TNT doesn't have anywhere near enough power to trigger an earthquake. TNT compared to the power of a natural earthquake is like a cheap firecracker.
The energy required to artificially trigger earthquakes is tremendous - on the order of thousands to millions of megatons depending upon the stability of the land mass in question.

Science could possibly develop a weapon such as a particle beam cannon that could trigger earthquakes but it would require many nuclear reactors to power it.

Answer 2

Yes - on the "butterfly effect" - the results are unpredictable.

The butterfly effect is a phrase that encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. Small variations of the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. This is sometimes presented as esoteric behavior, but can be exhibited by very simple systems: for example, a ball placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position.

The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that ultimately cause a tornado to appear (or, for that matter, prevent a tornado from appearing). The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different.

Recurrence, the approximate return of a system towards its initial conditions, together with the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, are the two main ingredients for chaotic motion. They have the practical consequence of making complex systems, such as the weather, difficult to predict past a certain time range (approximately a week in the case of weather).

Find a willing butterfly!

Answer 3

Its not really possible for an individual to do. I think there was sort of man made earthquake (either in africa or china) several years ago when a dam was built and a huge reservoir of water built up behind it. The weight of the water on the underlying rocks caused the rocks to fracture, and there was an earthquake.

If you can't build a dam, you could try jumping up and down? If you do it close to a seisometer, you'll register a tiny earthquake. I'm a geologist and we have one on display where I work. If you walk past it your footsteps register as seismic tremors.

Answer 4

The energy needed would be tremendous. An earthquake of 4 is a minimal shake . in power about the minimal power is 3 dB that would be considered. the scale for earthquake is measurement steps in 4 to 4.1 the 4.1 required 10 times the energy. For the 3db the reading would be 4.03 that is about the minimal change u could sense. similar a terrorist blew up the bldg in Oklahoma ,the terrorist in Canada had a little over 2 times the explosion material that would be only 3 dB greater.it would take tremendous energy.

Answer 5

Yes it is possible to trigger earthquakes and they have been well documented.

For example, injection of fluids underground has been known to cause low-level earthquakes. This was seen in the Rocky Flats area near Denver in the 1960's when toxic material was injected into hazardous waste disposal wells.

It apparently caused earthquakes to occur in a previously earthquake quiet area. The focal depths of the quakes ranged between 4 and 8 km, just below the 3.8 km-deep wells.

Answer 6

Yes.

Many years ago, someone was pumping waste water into abandoned wells near a dormant fault line, and it caused the earth to slip, causing low-level earthquakes. When the pumping stopped, so did the earthquakes. I think it was in the Rocky Flats nuclear plant area, north west of Denver, sometime in the 1960's.

Answer 7

Get a massive erection and start jumping up and down the waves created will cause a reaction in the earths core that will trigger an earthquake...

Alright... I could come up with something scientific that would make tons of sense, but I'm feeling lazy right now...

Answer 8

yes but u wuld need to search fault lines and use some sort of seismic reader to find an area under tremendous stress then get some TNT but not too much or it wont trigger a reaction

Answer 9

Easy. All you have to do is push one tectonic plate north and the other one south. You have to be very, very strong, however. Maybe the Governor of California can do it. He's shaken the state up in enough other ways . . .

Answer 10

No.

Theoretically, yes, but why would you want too?

Find a fault line and load it with nuclear warheads until it gave way. However, there not sure this would work unless you laid them out "properly."