## 3 Results
### On Temporal Variations of Solar Activity, Galactic Cosmic Rays, and Global Seismicity  
The results in Figures 2-7 support the idea that seismic activity increases when the atmosphere conductivity increases. In the considered cases, the precipitation of high-energy electrons from the outer radiation belt due to the magnetic storms increased conductivity at mesosphere heights [45], which is, on average, purely conductive. It was considered above that in a purely conductive stratosphere and troposphere, the galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) are mainly input to ionization and conductivity [23; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28; 29; 30; 31]. The flux of GCR increases in a solar minimum [28; 29]; thus, one may expect increasing seismic activity in a solar minimum. Nowadays, earthquake rows are insufficient (especially for strong events [49])  
Figure 8: Geomagnetic field lines connecting magnetically conjugated sites, adapted with permission from Ref. [48]. to carry out such analysis with a high statistical significance; nevertheless, a tendency to increase seismic activity with decreasing solar activity is evident. Hence, in [50], an out-of-phase relationship was found between secular variations in solar activity and seismic energy released on the planet in 1690-2002. The same result was obtained in [51; 52]. It was shown in [53] that out of the 12 strongest earthquakes (with a magnitude of more than 7.5) that occurred in Japan in 1700-2005, nine events (-70%) were confined to periods of low solar activity when the intensity of galactic cosmic rays was increased. Figure 9 presents the daily counts of earthquakes with a magnitude of M \(\geq\) 4.5 that occurred on the Earth from 1 January 1973 to 31 December 2017, estimated based on the USGS Global Seismological Catalog. Over 226,000 earthquakes with a magnitude of M \(\geq\) 4.5 occurred during these years. Figure 9 shows that the number of seismic events around the globe has shown a sharp increase since the beginning of the 21 st century. To underline that this is not a result of increasing global seismic network, which could register more effectively low magnitude earthquakes, we present in Figure 10 daily values of the released at the Earth seismic energy (log Es \(=11.8+1.5\)\(M\)) for the same period, from 1 January 1973 to 31 December 2017. The thick red line is a linear trend, which shows a monotonic, slightly increasing seismic energy from 1973 to 2017; the dashed square marks the cluster of the five strongest earthquakes (magnitudes more than 8.5) that occurred on the globe at the beginning of the 21 st century: M9.1 (Sumatra, the Andaman Islands on 26 December 2004), M8.6 (northern Sumatra on 28 March 2005), M 8.8 (Chile on 27 February 2010), M 9.0 (Great Tohoku Earthquake, Japan on 11 March 2011), and M 8.6 (northern Sumatra on 11 April 2012). Because of the hypothesis that seismic activity increases with increasing galactic cosmic ray (GCR) flux--which increases conductivity in the lower stratosphere and upper troposphere and thus increases the effectivity of the global electric circuit functioning, of which one element is an earthquake [8]--we show in Figure 11 the monthly time variation of galactic cosmic ray count (pink curve) and sunspot number (black curve) for the period 1979-2020, as obtained from [54]. Figure 11 shows out-of-phase variations in galactic cosmic rays and sunspot numbers. The black dashed line in Figure 11 is the time mean value of GCR counts. In contrast, the gold and green dashed lines indicate the one-half standard  
Figure 9: The daily counts of earthquakes with a magnitude of M \(\geq\) 4.5 occurred on the Earth from 1 January 1973 to 31 December 2017.  
deviation above and below the mean, defining the maximum and minimum GCR groups, respectively. It can be seen that during the two decades of the 21 st century, the intensity of GCR increased compared to previous decades.