Could a Change in the Earth's Spin Lead to More Earthquakes Next Year?

Damage from the November 2017 M7.3 earthquake near the Iran/Iraq border. Farzad Menati / Wikimedia Commons If you've seen the news over the weekend, you might have seen a bevy of article proclaiming that 2018 will see a big surge in M7+ earthquakes. My first reaction was "ugh" and the next was "sigh". I thought that yet again the media was being duped by crackpots trying to sell some snake oil prediction scheme. However, that first pass may have been misguided, but old habits die hard. Instead, this dramatic statement came from a paper in Geophysical Research Letters and an abstract from the Geological Society of America meeting in Seattle. Roger Bilham (Colorado) and Rebecca Bendick (Montana) presented a model that predicts that 2018 will be the opening of a window of potentially higher large earthquake activity due to very, very slight changes in the rate that the Earth spins. ...