Interestingly only non conductors are piezoelectric! That is an interesting idea I hadn't pondered.
How might this affect the topic of telluric currents?
-webolife
The effects would probably be minimal, on a global scale.
Piezo materials, including crystals and ceramics generate a voltage in response to an applied mechanical stress. In what is known as the inverse piezoelectric effect, these same materials will lengthen or shorten in response to an applied voltage.
Both effects entail high frequency oscillations and very small currents. Although quarts and feldspar are the two most common elements in the Earth's crust, either effect is more likely to be of a local nature.
Telluric currents (low frequency) are probably of an more inductive nature, ie moving EM fields penetrating a conductive crust and/or flowing conductors like oceans and magmas traversing Earth's magnetic field, though the book is far from written.
Many modern piezo-transducers are manufactured semiconductors, and with natural quartz being used to 'seed' the beds for silicon wafer stock. It seems, in a broad sense, that the 'doped' semiconductors are mimicking a condition of charge mobility that is produced naturally by certain crystal geometries?
My work was with UT and the use of piezoelectrics, not the manufacture of transducers...