Even if we could identify the right points there's a big liability shift both legal and political between doing nothing and intentionally setting off an earthquake that would be hard to predict the size of. It's part of why proscribed burns fell out of favor, it's way easier to do nothing and blame nature than defending damage caused by intentional acts. It gets into messy areas where it's hard to convince people that the damage was lesser than it otherwise would have been in the future.
Morbidly adjacent, the US is still getting dragged over the coals for using nukes on Japan rather than a ground invasion.
The energy being released in these many tiny earthquakes was always going to exist in this location. Much better to release it slowly via thousands of tiny earthquakes than all at once. Better to have 10k magnitude 3 quakes than one magnitude 7.
ranger_danger•44m ago
ENOMEM•41m ago