Is it possible to cancel out an Earthquake?

[Magnetar_Byte]

We do something similar to this in headphones where we produce the sound wave that cancels out the sound around the headphones. This would be on another level entirely of course, i’m talking levels of power on that of Nuclear power plant x100. In theory this is the same thing all that's different are the power levels we would need to equal that of an Earthquake.

Perhaps we could only mitigate small earthquakes at first as our power systems aren’t yet strong enough. But as time goes on we could easily be able to wirelessly transfer MASSIVE levels of powers INSTANTLY to an area where it's occurring. That way we wouldn’t need to have the generators on sight therefore risking damage to such expensive hardware. But rather only risk the semi expensive receivers of the power we’d be sending to them.

This could save so many lives, I only hope me or someone else creates this to save us from ourselves.

[Dissitesuxba11s]

Looks like someone has already thought of the idea:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/539gqb/how-a-seismic-cloak-could-slow-down-an-earthquake

[Magnetar_Byte]

Just now, Dissitesuxba11s said:

Looks like someone has already thought of the idea:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/539gqb/how-a-seismic-cloak-could-slow-down-an-earthquake

Good to see someone took this further then a simple tech forum. 
Thanks for link mate

U think there's any likelihood of us doing this tho. I'm,thinking possibly, but the amount of energy needed along with the infrastructure is quite a bit.

Always a good thought experiment tho

[harryk]

It's an interesting concept for sure but I there are some fundamental challenges; namely the fact that earthquakes are imperfect circular waves and you cannot have destructive interference without having constructive interference somewhere else.

 

An earthquake propagates outward in all directions from its epicenter. Then a detection station picks it up, analyzes the waveform and creates the anti-earthquake using a machine at another location. What this machine would have to do is create an earthquake of the same intensity but offset in time. This "anti"-earthquake them propagates outward in all directions from the machine. The goal is to destructively interfere the two waves in order to nullify the earthquake, but the destructive interference will only occur in localized areas. Some areas will still experience the original earthquake, some will experience the "anti"-earthquake (which is really just another earthquake), and the least fortunate will experience a double earthquake as the two constructively interfere.

 

It may be possible to more effectively nullify the earthquake in a local region by utilizing numerous machines to create a complex compounded waveform, but even this is limited to a certain area and everything outside that area will be struck by all the "anti"-earthquakes.

 

 

 

[Loote]

I don't think you get how powerful earthquakes are:

magnitude 5 earthquake taking 30 seconds would produce over 66 GW of power, in comparison,

Three Gorges Dam is able to produce 1/3 of that and even if you only need to block small portion of the released energy, just look at how fast those numbers increase. The above argument about how hard it'd be is another thing, in air sound waves are somewhat stable, but earth's crust is made of different materials, so not only the distance from epicentre is different, but the speed at which the wave travels differs too.   The idea of stopping waves is much more probable, smashing a 0.5 kg piece of steel profile may require tens of tonnes of force, which is hundreds of kilowatts and the way scientists are, they probably are going to use some material to disturb the wave more than stop/bounce them.

[Soppro]

As you said, we already do this to cancel out sound waves, but it is extremely hard to do this on a larger scale, see: 

 

 

To even begin to think about developing something that achieves quake-cancelling characteristics, we need a lot of work on our power generation and transmission infrastructure, but even then it might not be possible to delivery the amount of energy an anti-earthquake would need.

 

 

[zassou]

i think the problem is two fold:

1. limited by current technology it's impossible to predict when and where an earthquake will happen, but to alarm major cities seconds before the tremor hits.

2. earth crust is not a uniformed mass, the density and composition changes from place to place, making countermeasure difficult.