It may seem strange to many, but the mineral world knows what happens to it when it receives a stimulus, and moreover if this is the first time it is stimulated. That is why it has a response. Listening to it, and also how to do it, modulating that language and interpreting it for the community, is the duty of geologists. But then, what language do mountains and rocks, silts and gravels, clays and faults speak?

The answer is called deformation, the question or the demand of the environment to obtain those answers is tension. The conversation is a symphony written on a pentagram framed between parameters of tension deformation. Interpreting it requires at least a little generosity, that is, a little attention.

Let's look at a couple of examples with deep rocks: the tunnels between the two northernmost Japanese islands in the 1980s, or those in the English Channel between France and Great Britain in the 1990s. To be successful, the stress state at the depths concerned must be perfectly known and the isolated, narrow cylinder that will link two lands under the sea must be installed. To do this, we extract samples, subject them to stress in a laboratory and here is their response: before breaking, at a threshold of 80% of the breaking stress, they begin to crack. There is microseismic activity, if at 85% or even 90% of the rupture stress we remove the load, the rock quiets down. Everything is a back and forth impulse, the rock returns to its being but now it is wiser, its particles have known a new experience.

So, if we load again, when does its response in the form of crackling and internal readjustment to the stress it is subjected to begin? Indeed, not before 85-90%. It had already learned and internalized it, and so it had adapted; successively we ask it again until reaching 92, 95 and finally 100% when it fades and succumbs: it is the rupture... That which it showed in its first crackles was the tensional state down there, where the tunnels will pass, the state in which it begins to scream; it has statement in its mechanical language: tension deformation, the transducers, or the polygraph, only amplify that response, it is called the Kaiser effect.

A soil does the same, a clay, a gravel... We subject it to stress, its pathway adjusts to that known experience, it carries it in its report, a technician will see it as a mere stress deformation curve that is elastic, continuous, predictable..., the path is back and forth, we can put a building on top and remove it again, the soil will recover, it is all registered in its report, in the order of its particles. Those innermost particles are already ready for the response. But if we exceed, if we exceed the stress known for millions of years, the response is critical, excessive deformation and even rupture ends with the order established by millions of years of geological, climatic, human dynamics... It is called edometric effect.

A close example is the Parliament of Navarra, a building converted from the former Court of Justice to the center of the decisions of the Autonomous Community; the gravel known as gravel of Pamplona hosted a nineteenth century building with 50 tons per square meter for over 100 years, the land accepted Degree good that static momentum. During the works for its transformation into the Parliament, a pouring was foreseen to reduce these loads to 25 tons. Nothing new, everything controlled and memorized, however, the excavation for basement irregularly carried out by men, would take a few days to a critical status as the known starting postulates were not met. Locally 90 tons were reached for a few hours. The south interior wall rested on the grounds to which this new information was forced, it was not in its report, this one reached only 50, to reach 90 was escaping it, it needed therefore a new answer and a reordering: three centimeters of deformation were its best answer, enough to, warning hours before with shuddering creaks, to make collapse a good part of the building. It was at night, it was the eve of San Fermin, nobody wanted to hear it and everything vanished.

For more than two months the earth has been creaking in the sierra del Perdón, large cortical zones also keep information in their report; the devas that are remembered in ancestral languages such as Sanskrit or Basque make reference letter to that animated report , there was a time when the human being saw himself included in the landscape, by the hand of those mythological entities; distancing himself was as necessary as it was modern. The living report sacrificed itself to quantify nature; but the reality is that nature quantifies in its own way, it is very wise and very complex, these are not the crystallized and frozen ways of our intellect. Although we do understand the crunching and at those scales it scares us, nature does not usually show linear, parabolic or hyperbolic behaviors.

The almost 300 earthquakes that have occurred in the last two months should be welcomed for what they are: a real response, a response to some cortical effort absent from the report of the Sierra del Perdón. If such a common impulse had been given previously, there would not be an aftershock, it would not crackle, and an aftershock in its best context: the resounding and repeated answer of a patron saint that is beginning to be habitual: a seismic response to new cortical and climatic stresses never experienced before.

And it is true that we humans are very modern, so much so that we have made the weak and fragile interface in which we live between the atmosphere and the hydrosphere social, we treat it as our own and we call it with all the arrogance we are capable of natural heritage. But by acting in this way, in addition to demonstrating a great deal of modernity, we also appropriate something whose dynamics we do not even know, let alone control.

The Sierra del Perdón screams, creaks, revolts..., it has been doing it for two months, are we going to continue with our deafness knowing that it is going through something new for which it only has this answer? Or are we going to try to understand what is really disturbing its peace and that of 350,000 people who share a common space on this fragile interface? Will it be able to revolt in a more forceful way and give us a bad answer, or will it continue boasting a scientific peace that perhaps one day it will run out? If we continue to skimp on the means to know our habitat and its dynamics, one day it will respond to us in a more forceful way and we will be the ones who will not find the explanation for the oblivion of our own actions. I hope that our leaders wake up to the fact that the seismic threat of the Pamplona Basin may be real, acting like an ostrich and ignoring what nature insists on reminding us does not lessen the accumulation of stresses or the increase of interstitial pressures of fluids in the faults. Peace-science is a lot, but every one, two, or ten decades, nature reminds us with an unpleasant reminder of its enormous strength. The Uterga earthquake of April 20, 2013, as well as the one a month earlier in Etxauri, relaxed as much cortical force as two atomic bombs similar to those of Hiroshima. It is not the first time nor will it be the last to happen near the capital of Navarra. The 21st century awaits an answer.