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Subject: An weapon that can cause massive earthquakes.
Miles    3/31/2007 8:53:12 PM
What would be a good weapon, which can cause powerful earthquakes, strong enough to destroy a city? Any good concepts?
 
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Treadgar       3/31/2007 11:45:53 PM
I'm not being very original, but that might be a GRASER. You can guess what that stands for. For more info see David Brin's novel "Earth."
 
Treadgar
 
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doggtag       4/1/2007 12:25:36 AM
What was the James Bond movie where they were going to detonate a massive shaped charge along a fault line to flood Silicon Valley?
 
I doubt a single conventional explosive could do it (even several dozen tons worth), but a series of high-yield underground nukes along a fault line might cause enough vibration and stress (I'm just guessing here).
 
The book "The Forge of God" mentions an un-named alien race who perceived Earth as a threat and launched a combined planet-destroying assault, in the form of a pair of one matter and one anti matter neutronium "slugs" (the book referred to them as freight trains) that sunk through the Earth's crust and orbitted around inside the planet's mantle and core until they met catastrophically.
They were backed up by a number of deep aquatic harvester machines that were working along the Pacific and Atlantic fault lines, harvestings deuterium out of sea water (to the point the oxygen content of the atmosphere was increasing so much that forest fires and other flame combustion were becoming uncontrollable), leaving a trail of nukes along the fault lines as they went, with the intent of detonating them simultaneously to crack the crust and allow the neutronium/anti-neutronium reaction in the core to totally destroy the planet.
 
Mind you, we're eons from being able to create anti-neutronium, let alone the regular matter. But stringing nukes along fault lines, especially ones semi-active where tremors are common, might bring the seismic plate activity to life.
 
We've also made similar suggestions in the past as to how to awaken inactive volcanoes by artificial means.
 
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Ehran       4/1/2007 7:52:07 AM
there has been at least one incidence of earth tremors being caused by pumping water down near a fault line. 
 
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andyf    antigravity   4/5/2007 10:48:18 PM
any sort of gravity reduction or negation effect aimed into the ground would cause drastic earthquakes
 
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TrustButVerify       4/6/2007 10:04:17 AM
Someone has already mentioned pumping water near fault lines. The Army caused accidentally tremors (in the 1960s I think) when "disposing" of chemical weapons agents by pumping the liquid into deep wells. Arguably not the smartest course of action, even by the standards of the day.
Crichton had his eco-terrorists in State of Fear induce some sort of seismic activity through use of cavitation generators and carefully-timed explosives. There might be something to this if you're dealing with a sufficiently touchy fault line. doggtag, the James Bond movie you're thinking of is A View to a Kill. My first Bond movie, as it happens.
 
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Savvy       10/6/2013 11:28:32 PM
Andyf
 
Why do you believe so?
 
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