Can Solar Storms Trigger Earthquakes?

8:45allows you to freeze bacteria and reanimate them 5,000 years later, maybe Walt Disney has a chance because if I recall correctly he's currently cryo frozen somewhere deep underneath uh Burbank's headquarters. That is that is rumor. >> That's rumor, of course. >> That's I don't know that to be true. >> anything about it. >> Though not that to be true. But this is again new research paper out of the Institute of Biology in Bucharest of the Romanian Academy. It was in Frontiers in Microbiology. Fun little microbiology story to get us started on our rundown. Number two on our rundown today is can solar storms trigger earthquakes?

9:27>> Yes. >> And scientists propose a surprising link. This is was actually covered by Science Daily. That was out of Kyoto University. Um and the there's a huge solar storm monitoring community on a variety of social media channels. Every time there is a I guess a coronal mass ejection or similar >> there's this like ranking system that's like the Richter scale and everyone's like, "This one is over 9,000, you know, hunker down prepper." But but the there's a there's a potential link here to actually like geological activity. >> Yeah, and that one I was pretty surprised that there is even a theoretical argument that you can make here. And this is mostly a theoretical

10:08argument. This is a theoretical paper. Um what they're doing is showing a surprising theoretical connection between space weather and earthquakes, geological activity on Earth. Now, how does that even what what is the mechanism there, right? Is what I always wonder. So, here's the idea. Um faults on the Earth are poised at a kind of critical spot where there's a lot of stress on them and they're ready to snap, okay? Cuz they've they've been pushed to their brink and like the faults on the Earth are these, you know, plates on the Earth's surface that are contiguous blocks of the Earth's crust that are moving around because

10:48magma underneath is like flowing in a liquid motion and so you you know, you move around just like how um ice on a frozen lake sort of moves around based on currents underneath. So, why would why would that be affected by solar >> Right. >> activity is the idea. Well, solar activity is effectively a bunch of charged particles coming at us. That's effectively what it is, right? There's a bunch of electrons, let's say, that come at us and those electrons are going to create a massive change in the ionosphere. The ionosphere being the outside ions around the Earth's atmosphere that are built by the

11:29magnetic field that sort of um you know, shield us from space weather. Now, that ionosphere is going to get changed up a lot because there's going to be a huge influx of um, charged particles from the sun. That's going to change the electric field on the Earth. The Earth's crust on the other hand has all of these plates that are sort of at this critical point and in between all these plates inside the Earth's crust, there's a lot of water that is in a super critical state because it's under high pressure, it's under high stress. And that water has a bunch of ions. So, the electric field on the outside is going to move around the electric field inside these cracks in the Earth's crust and that could potentially create enough

12:11of a force to actually snap and create high earthquakes, you know, high um, damage earthquakes. >> The The idea is that there is these fields that are all around us all the time and interacting have uh, impacts in the physical nature in which we see and we interact that the tangible things we can touch and feel. And at the scale of the sun >> Yes. >> uh, and the scale of these solar storms >> Yeah. >> the amount of the change in fields in the ionosphere can potentially have a subsequent impact on plate tectonics >> Yeah. >> and and how they move which again, big

12:52enough solar storm means it would not only trigger things like frying electronics and all that other stuff >> Yeah. >> but it could actually physically uh, impact >> the Earth. >> uh, the Earth uh, itself. >> Yeah, and there's like weak correlation between solar activity and geological activity. If you go to 2.5, there's a weak correlation that was out in scientific reports, um, nature scientific reports in 2020. Again, it's not that big and this paper is not claiming, this current paper out in 2026 is not claiming that, you know, solar flares directly cause all quakes, but the research provides this like kind of new mechanism to explain maybe unusual ionospheric activity and that

13:34connection with major quakes. Because in 2024 there was the Noto Peninsula quake. And that was preceded by a really large solar storm. And so there's these coincident sort of We don't have enough data to like, you know, the sigma isn't down to five, but it's there and this is exploring some of the mechanisms. I think that's I think that was like pretty cool. >> Yeah, that that No, that is >> It's very speculative, but even even the fact that the sun could affect earthquakes >> is is a very interesting >> that is and I think the plot of a future upcoming Jerry Bruckheimer produced disaster movie. Jerry, if you want a