Solved: How Tides Can Trigger Earthquakes

The tides are turning in a quest to solve an earthquake mystery.

Years ago, scientists realized that earthquakes along mid-ocean ridges — those underwater mountain ranges at the edges of the tectonic plates — are linked with the tides. But nobody could figure out why there’s an uptick in tremors during low tides.

“Everyone was sort of stumped, because according to conventional theory, those earthquakes should occur at high tides,” explained Christopher Scholz, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

In a study published today in Nature Communications, he and his colleagues have uncovered the mechanism for this seeming paradox, and it comes down to the magma below the mid-ocean ridges.

“It’s the magma chamber breathing, expanding and contracting due to the tides, that’s making the faults move,” said Scholz, who co-led the study along with Lamont-Doherty graduate student Yen Joe Tan.

Going against the tide

The low tide correlation is surprising because of the way the mid-ocean fault moves. Scholz described the fault as a tilted plane that separates two blocks of earth. During movement, the upper block slides down with respect to the lower one. So, scientists expected that at high tides, when there is more water sitting on top of the fault, it would push the upper block down and cause the earthquakes. But that’s not what happens. Instead, the fault slips down during low tide, when forces are actually pulling upwards — “which is the opposite of what you’d expect,” said Scholz.

To get to the bottom the mystery, he, Tan, and Fabien Albino from the University of Bristol studied the Axial Volcano along the Juan de Fuca Ridge in the Pacific Ocean. Because the volcano erupts every ten years or so, scientists have set up dense networks of ocean bottom instruments to monitor it. The team used the data from those instruments to model and explore different ways the low tides could be causing the tremors.Axial Volcano off the coast of Oregon on the Juan de Fuca Ridge