A reduction in seismic noise is a boon for geoscientists
nature.com
nature.com
(For background, you can also use the noise from trucks/etc as a seismic source to probe the structure of the subsurface. It's much more computationally intensive and, well, noisy, but it actually works!)
Namely, this is only used for locations close roads? Can other natural occurrences of sound give the same result? Can the same source that’s moving give a better picture of what’s below by that fact that it’s moving? Ie setup at different locations, so to speak.
More or less any source of noise that's loud enough and is coupled to the ground works. In fact, a lot of what winds up being a good source is actually things like ocean waves -- not just man-made noise.
Ideally, you want a clear "spike" of noise at a lot of locations and not necessarily a moving source. However, something like a truck/train hitting bumps at different locations along the road could definitely do a nice job of that.
At any rate, the basic idea is to look at cross correlations of the waveforms -- any noise that is clearly correlative at different seismic stations is used.
Take all of this with a grain of salt -- I work in an adjacent field and not exactly this one.
By that I mean I'm wondering if all of our moving around normally may be like nano events that cumulatively ease pressure on fault lines? Almost like all of our movements sort-of force the faults to gently slip all the time instead of making giant movements, thus releasing an earthquake. But if we're not moving around much then that pressure starts to build up.
Same way as water can be overheated or supercooled when there is no trigger present, impurity or shock that will localize the start of reaction, the Earth crust can store a little bit of extra energy when there is not enough trigger.
This is only temporary effect, after some time the level will come back even without increase in human activity.
When human activity is restored what you can expect is seismic activity above normal levels, for some time until the stored energy is dissipated.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190221002919/https://en.wikipe...
I think the answer is not a question of "could" but "to what extent". It may not even be detectable, but the principle you described seem sound.
Probably not.
It's a pretty widely held opinion that the earthquakes from fracking - generally 2-4 on the Richter scale - didn't do anything to ease pressure on fault lines. People moving around is much lower energy than that.
Edit: the article mentioned a relevant tweet https://twitter.com/celestelabedz/status/1243306005456289792...