[margalabargala]

> He is probably more knowledgeable than the average person and has access to latest data on earthquakes.

The person in question's area of "expertise" is claiming that when planets line up to form geometric shapes (e.g. when earth, uranus, and neptune form approximately an equilateral triangle) that this somehow affects seismic activity on our planet. The claim isn't that it's closeness of celestial objects causing this effect, mind you, it's the fact that the planets, however distant, happen to be in a configuration that resembles a geometric primitive.

It sets off a lot of my woo detectors. Here's their website: https://ssgeos.org/

[csomar]

Two ways to verify this:

- Enough data that the correlation becomes strong enough.

- The physics community chimes in? I mean the effect could only be due to gravity unless there is another mechanism we don't understand. But given how small the earth is, and how big other planets are, I'd suspect the physics people to see this effect somewhere else?

[jamiek88]

No, absolutely not - gravity is an inverse distance squared force.

The sun dominates our gravity environment and planets at those distances have negligible effects (really effectively zero) certainly not seismic size perturbations!

The gravitational force from the other planets does slightly affect the Earth's orbit, but the gravitational pull from the other planets and the Moon is still very small. The gravitational pull of the Moon on the Earth is only 0.55% of the gravitational force between the Sun and the Earth, other planets even less than that. Unlikely, very unlikely to trigger earthquakes!

[heavenlyblue]

> The gravitational pull of the Moon on the Earth is only 0.55% of the gravitational force between the Sun and the Earth, other planets even less than that. Unlikely, very unlikely to trigger earthquakes!

Playing the devil's advocate, but doesn't Moon affect the movement of water on Earth (i.e. low-high tide) and these are massive movements of mass which could potentially trigger an earthquake?

[margalabargala]

The moon, sure. Neptune, not so much.

One would also expect this effect to be a function of distance, not of how prettily lined-up the planets are or the shapes they make when viewed from above.

My claim isn't that it's unlikely that any celestial body can affect earthquake likelihood. It's that it's unlikely that earthquake likelihood is affected by pretty geometry of planet arrangements that do not include our own.

For example, on the "About" page of their website, they show this image:

https://ssgeos.org/images/planets/1960/1960-05-21.jpg

They go on to make the claim that earthquakes were more likely on Earth, because if you draw a line from Venus to Neptune, and another line from Mars to Uranus, those lines cross at right angles.

[csomar]

But isn’t this earthquake microscopic in the scale of the earth?

But I get your point. The sun should be responsible for most of these earthquakes (if gravity was to play a role) unless its gravitational field is prefectly uniform.

I better give up on this because my understanding of gravity and general relativity is based on youtube videos.

[jcranmer]

> - The physics community chimes in? I mean the effect could only be due to gravity unless there is another mechanism we don't understand. But given how small the earth is, and how big other planets are, I'd suspect the physics people to see this effect somewhere else?

To be totally honest, we don't actually know what specifically causes earthquakes. That is to say, we understand that earthquakes are essentially the sudden, violent release of stress due to crustal deformation, but we don't have great ideas for understanding what causes the stress to be released so violently. As a result, even basic tasks like earthquake forecasting or merely distinguishing a mainshock from a foreshock (before the mainshock occurs) have turned out to be miserable failures.

But as for planetary orientations having an effect via gravity... well, let me put it in perspective. To exert the same gravitational pull on an object on Earth as Jupiter does, the average human being would have to stand does math 15cm away.