Hi Jim, it doesn't say what the rate is for any of the radioactive material they've looked at but it must have been large enough for it to have been noticed by accident. As it's partly seasonal, they will be looking at things like temperature and humidity changes in the measuring equipment. it really does sound like they've done that and are now dipping their toes in the water to see what the community thinks.
The annual energy release from earthquakes is about 1E 25 ergs, the energy release from radioactive decay is a thousand times more !E 28 ergs per year, or 1E 6 J/sec That's an awful lot of energy. Even if this variation is very slight, it will have an accumulative effect on the millions of tonnes of radioactive materials making up the earth.
I noted the almost coy way that an unknown particle was introduced into the article. They have to be thinking graviton here. Well, gravitons will be e able to go straight through the Earth as if it were glass; in fact a lot of the Earth is glasslike. Though I can't see graviton flux as varying to any great degree, over billions of years. Neutrinos yes, but then we have the problem of how they can change decay rates, they shouldn't do much of anything. Another problem is that we don't know a lot about convection rates in the layers of this glasslike rheid material at depth. A sudden change in radioactive decay rates could cause differentiated dramatic changes to the layer system. That would give us increased vulcanism, earthquakes and global weather changes.
All very interesting stuff.
