Blaming it on the sun

Yes, I saw the article that claimed they found a correlation between strong solar winds and earthquakes.

I'm still mulling it over. I have to try to work through their statistical model myself. My immediate reaction is that something's wrong.

Executive summary: really strong solar storms seem to be associated with higher numbers of earthquakes about a day after the peak passes.

The notion that solar weather might effect the Earth's crust seems far-fetched, but it has been around for a while. It hasn't gathered much favor, because the analyses tended to show no correlation. Early ones did, which is why people thought of it. But it isn't entirely crazy: faults aren't obviously the same as nearby rock, and an electric current induced in the fault could result in forces perpendicular to the fault--closing it tighter or opening it up, depending on the direction. One possibility is "inverse pizoelectric" forces, especially if there's a lot of quartz involved: an electric field makes the quartz crystal flex. And we've seen earthquake lights, so something electrical can happen.

But why would this happen after the peak instead of during the rise? (Rising and falling times are when you get induced currents elsewhere--steady state solar wind wouldn't.) The total current being deflected around the earth in a solar storm is pretty gigantic, but it's mostly pretty far off. But on the "stick beat dog" principle, if changes in the current in the magnetosphere caused turmoil in the plasmasphere, that might induce some electric fields in the crust. I'm not sure about the time scale, but days seems maybe a bit long. But figuring out what the conductivity of fault rock is turns out to be quite a rabbit hole--the rock type, how much water is in the area, etc etc. I gather people haven't drilled down into too many deep earthquake faults to get samples.

I still don't get why the decreasing wind would correlate better than the increasing. In fact, I'd guess there'd be more of quick fast shock and a longer slow speed tail. (It wouldn't be the first time my intuition was wrong, though.)

I think they made a mistake somewhere.

But if it were a real effect, maybe you could look at faults that trend more or less in the direction of the expected delta-B: which for places like Alaska would be north-south vs those that break more or less east-west or up-down.