This is the slightly edited text of a request that I recently received for information regarding the subject of earthquake triggering. I am going to assume that this person is whom he says he is. If you would like to contact him regarding this subject matter then an address for his interesting Web site can be found here. And an e-mail address where you can reach him can be found at his Web site.

Dear E (some text edited out)

I'm interested in various half-baked but intriguing proposals to mitigate earthquake hazards by deliberately 'triggering' them, gently and continuously, to relieve tectonic stress without sudden jerks. Lots of people have been talking about this - please give me names, or forward this note to them for their responses to me directly - and various geologic processes and events over recent decades that suggest that such a task of 'geologic engineering' is conceivable, if still not technologically (or legally) feasible.

My purpose is as follows. I'm a veteran science writer and former NASA Mission Control worker (www.jamesoberg.com for details) who is now preparing an article for 'Popular Science' magazine (and it will be a chapter in a subsequent book). I also give public lectures on 'biosphere engineering' and even 'terraforming' of other planets (and wrote a book about the latter), and other spaceflight-related topics.

The 'earthquake-taming' process would conceptually be akin to triggering avalanches in snow areas, or 'control burn' forest fires, both of which can occasionally create bad situations but which are acceptable procedures to minimize hazards from random release of large amounts of 'accumulated badness' (snow or brush). They do interfere with nature, and society accepts it. But those occur mostly in sparsely populated regions where mistakes are not costly, unlike the case with famous earthquake fault lines we all know and love.

(some text edited out)

Please pass this request around, or post it on appropriate bulletin boards and discussion groups. Thanks!

Jim Oberg