Slashdot Mirror

Around the Chesapake, apparent sea level has been rising for hundreds of years because the retreat of glaciers is effectively lowering the land and shore erosion as well.

No, I'm not joking.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs102-98/

The imagery is beneficial but the .shp files are of much more use and various localities give them away for free. For the twin cities area in Minnesota there is Metro GIS and for the whole state there is the DNR Data Deli and the MN DOT GIS sites. Not to mention the various stuff available from the fed the like TIGER or any of the stuff from the USGS, not to mention the National Atlas, National Map, or any number of other sources of info available.

Your believe is based on mythology, it also has evidence which is interpeted to fit the story. This is the same for creationists. both are religious views.

Which is complete nonsense, as science changes its beliefs based on the evidence all the time, whereas somebody dedicated to the inerrant truth of the Bible can't change the Bible. Well, they can, but they have to resort to reinterpretation. Religion is based on supernatural explanations, faith, dogma, and testimonial evidence, the weakest kind.

What a surprise that God would actually do things in a book about him.

Which god, and which book, and why do you think your particular god and books have any more authenticity than the others? And why would an all-powerful being not get the same message to everybody, throughout all time?

All the major lines of science were by creationists.

Now the question is why have so many scientists abandoned it since then? Most of the scientists mentioned were before Darwin's theory became accepted. They set out to look at the evidence and it didn't support the Hebrew mythology, so they abandoned it.

I found a link describing alot of your questions about the Ark.

And I still find it ridiculous that a man and his family were able to prepare food for that many animals without it rotting. The whole project is an insanely Herculean task (there's some Greek mythology for you).

but the RFS that caused the first cut into the then freashly laid soft rock.

Sorry, my mistake. I missed the part about soft rock, probably because I thought this guy was at least trying to be somewhat serious instead of trying to treat the geologic layers of the earth as differentiated mud from a single flood event.

It then says the scenerio of the uniformitarian explanation also requires soft alluvium but yet there is none there.

A simple explanation is that it was swept away by erosion if it's a high plain with not enough rain to keep plants and soil. Example: "Very fine grained, light-colored sand and gravel; deposits poorly preserved; thickness 0-2 m. Elevation ranges from 949-952 m near cableway. Mostly an erosional zone along margin of Colorado River." Assuming, of course, that geologists would agree that there's no trace in the area he is talking about.

There's plenty of alluvium evidence around the Grand Canyon, though.

Hence when one dating technique says 220,000,000 years and another says 33,000 it shows that the 220,000,000 has hidden assumptions behind it proven to be incorrect as something can not be both 33K and 220M yrs old at the same time.

I don't know if there is a legitimate discrepancy here (as in I don't know if these results have been verified by mainstream scientists doing their own excavations and tests), but just because there's an anomaly that doesn't mean you can throw out all the other evidence that brought geologists to their current theories.

For example, Back in my home country of New Zealand, there was a vocaino that exploded 3.5 million years ago on June 30, 1954. radioactive dating failure

Anti-link:

"[..] the K-Ar method cannot be used to date samples that are much younger than 6,000 years old [..] their website clearly stated in a footnote that their equipment could not accurately date rocks that are younger than about 2 million years old [..] Considering the statements at the Geochron website and the lowest age limitations of the K-Ar method, why did Austin submit a recently erupted dacite to this laboratory and expect a reliable answer??? Contrary to Swenson's uninformed claim that ' Dr Aus

Fact of the matter is the whole freaking area is WAY overdue for a huge earthquake of the proportions that crashed and burned the city at the start of the 20th century. Until that occurs I have to wonder about putting my family in danger.

Sure, there is danger everywhere but ask any Geologist about the chances of a major earthquake in San Francisco and it's definitely not trivial.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/ucerf/

No matter where you live, you can always worry about something.

An earthquake that kills 75 people once in a lifetime? I'll take my chances...

Fact of the matter is the whole freaking area is WAY overdue for a huge earthquake of the proportions that crashed and burned the city at the start of the 20th century. Until that occurs I have to wonder about putting my family in danger.

Sure, there is danger everywhere but ask any Geologist about the chances of a major earthquake in San Francisco and it's definitely not trivial.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/ucerf/

The kind of information they want to put in these codes could just be printed in clear text. This is just one company trying to get into a middle-man position where no middle-man is needed.

Exactly. Or link it to a drivers license or state ID, there's no reason to have an extra sticker that emergency medical personal are trying to search for. I can just see them running around searching for a sticker.
EMT #1: Check his wallet
EMT #2: Not there
EMT #1: Where's the helmet?
EMT #2: I don't see it on there either
EMT #1: Well screw it, we can't spend all night searching for a sticker!

WE already have state IDs, why not just use those? Even children can get a state ID. Put your ID number in a database and update that with medical information. Done. The irony here is on Lifesquare's website they have the EMT looking at the person's wallet and finding the sticker in the wallet. FAIL.

And how is this going to be profitable? Are you going to charge users for the stickers? Maybe a monthly subscription fee? Good luck with that. Or the hospitals should all pay monthly? A project like this is too big for a tiny startup, this needs to be done on a state wide government scale to be successful at all.

But it looks like Lifesquare is available in Marin County, CA. That's great, funding January 2011 and by June 2012 you have 1 county covered and only 3,140 counties to go.

Whenever I hear about these horrible startups I always wonder how much funding they've received. Unfortunately it doesn't say the amount, but it does say someone gave them venture funding for this really bad startup.

My state does that as does the US federal government. My personal favorite is:
The MN DNR data deli

There are others as well:
Federal GIS data
MN legislature GIS resource
MN DOT
Minnesota MetroGIS
2011 US Tiger data set
USGS data
National Atlas
This data is all freely available and you can go do what you want with it. Granted you need some program that can parse and display shapefiles but those aren't too hard to come by as there are some very capable open source ones available.

When it comes to coastal issues, a 3.5 inch sea rise in 50 years is relatively small.

is confusing as you're trying to say that a small amount of sea level rise doesn't matter very much towards coastal issues, which is the opposite of what this slashdot post is about. The sea level goes up, and the coastline moves inward. Not only from erosion (soil washing away), but because the water is moving further inland as it rises. Therefore, low-level areas will be submerged in water.

Sea level rise is not a relatively small coastal issue to an area like the the Maldives, which has an average ground level of 59 inches (the planet's lowest country). The sea rises, and not only does their coast disappear, but their whole country. That's kind of a huge issue.

If only there were some way for water in the oceans to be reclaimed - perhaps we could find some way to take water from the oceans, form them into big "clouds" and then have some sort of propuslion system (wind currents?) push them over dry patches of land and somehow have that water somehow drop from the sky onto the ground...

Oh wait, this might take care of it.

No, there is genuine potential. Ironically that potential is partially demonstrated by water wells.

There are a range of rock types in Vermont. Some are granites and higher-grade metamorphic rocks that wouldn't host oil or gas, and some are sedimentary and appropriate types of rock that they could. Vermont geology is pretty complicated, but basically it's more "cooked" to the east and less "cooked" to the west, with some unproductive Precambrian pushed up in the middle in the south. Some oil and gas wells have been drilled there. Some water wells have natural gas in them (called "gas shows"). You can get maps of them on this page. If you want the details of the geology, including some nice cross sections and a bunch of Google Earth overlays, try this page from the USGS (note: the PDF files there are huge and pretty technical).

Last I knew, it was still heavily debated exactly how much of an effect humans have had on global warming compared to natural causes (IE: volcanic eruptions).

Well, according to the USGS man made CO2 levels for 2010 were 35 billion metric tons while all volcanic activity was estimated at 0.26 billion metric tons. So keep spreading your lies and uncertainty about climate science. Your cheap rhetoric designed to protect your lifestyle is surprisingly effective against individuals who spend their lives studying this stuff and publishing in peer reviewed journals, NASA, etc.

Does it have an effect? Sure. Does it have a noticeable effect? Probably. Does it have a significant effect? Maybe. There's way too many variables to really be sure if humans are speeding up natural global warming by a significant amount (IE: accelerating it from millennia to centuries or centuries to decades).

All that bullshit peppered with weasel words like "probably" and "maybe" without a single citation. Well done. The concensus from the scientific community has been made, the burden of proof is now on you to refute their findings. Not vice versa. Not "probably" or "maybe."

But the problem is not only the plants that cause pollution..... The majority of 'instant' death's related to coal-power is at the coal-plants...

A few references related to coal-power...
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c01.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

Nuclear power is not unsafe... It's just the idiotic laws that are being passed that are blocking the construction of new and safer plants...
Just look at the Chinese... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html

Problem with nuclear power is not it's safety but the craze the media has put all the voters in about anything 'atomic' and then the politicians that then don't try to explain what is happening but just goes straight with the idiot-voters that don't have a clue about what is actually a danger...

Just look at why an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) was named that instead of NMRI (nuclear magnetic resonance imaging).. People are stupid and afraid of anything 'nuclear'... Just hope no one tells them they have about seven billion billion billion atoms inside their person...

Actually, BOTH the size and the location of the earthquake (which was centered off-shore) was known fairly quickly.
What wasn't know was whether or not a tsunami would result.

So issuing an accurate warning ten times faster (they had to have meant 1/10th the time) would have meant little, since the actual ground uplift movement was 80 miles out to sea, where no GPS meters would have been available. The actual quake itself was already known to be very large the instant it happened and the location was pin-pointed within minutes of the quake itself.

There is nothing GPS could have added to speed things up. They don't work underwater. Existing ocean buoy based sensors detected the tsunami as soon as the wave approached shallow waters where it could be distinguished from a normal wave.

So for the last several big quakes which happened off shore, these GPS detectors would not have helped speed the location or magnitude information at all. And as we have seen in recent weeks, large quakes more often then not do not trigger tsunamis.

Since quake magnitude and location are already known with minutes (generally within seconds of P wave arrival at a few sensors), I fail to see how this cuts down warning time. Since the quake is felt simultaneous with P wave arrival, the only thing left to warn about is a tsunami, and that determination is based almost solely on quake epicenter location, which is determined very very quickly by computer.

Go Google the location of the plates and fault lines, then look at earthquakes for the last 10 years and you will see a pattern.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ypalM7eSBEQ/SdzT_ajylVI/AAAAAAAAAbM/XNB1-z6lvKg/s1600-h/tectonic_map.jpg

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/year/byyear.php

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/region/N_America.php

Shows 4.3 and 5.1 in Central America in the past day...

Oh, yeah. Wikipedia is nice and all but since this is a question about geology and energy, let's ask the relevant government agencies, shall we?

This document from USGS shows 550 GWe potential. The science has improved a bit since then. And of course the US was generating 247 GWe of hydroelectric in 2007. Nobody is proposing we get rid of that (well, nobody who's going to get anywhere).

So that's 3/4ths of total power generation needs as baseload power. More than we need until the science improves some more, without cracking a single atom or burning a single gram of hydrocarbon fuel to produce electricity. There is every reason to believe that as we develop enhanced geothermal systems we will improve on the science and efficiency. And the geothermal resources are special in that they're highly dynamic: they can compensate for production changes or outages in non-baseload power like wind and solar in ways that nuclear cannot.

Of course exploiting these resources requires investment, as other energy production technologies do. But enhanced geothermal generation costs less even than nuclear just to get started per GWe, and there aren't the trailing costs and risks. It requires less water than the other methods also. It's geographically distributed, so transmission costs and losses can be lessened. It's a closed loop, so it's as environmentally friendly as it can get. It's no danger to birds or lizards.

Incidentally the EGS hardware can be adapted to capture industrial waste heat also.

I should mention that searching for excess geothermal heat in the near term isn't even necessary. It is quite often found incidental to ongoing oil and natural gas exploration. We know where more than enough resources are to keep engineers busy for a good long time.

This energy transfer from the deep earth to the atmosphere has been going on since the planet was formed. What is proposed is that we stop wasting it.

No, for a number of reasons. Even if smaller quakes simply "relieved stress," preventing larger quakes, the Richter scale is logarithmic so it'd take many small quakes to prevent a large one. USGS agrees: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/megaqk_facts_fantasy.php

This USGS article says (see figure 2; note logarithmic scale) that currently, 7 million metric tons of Zinc are mined annually. So, it's cheap. I agree with pence128 that a bit extra for use as catalyst will NOT show up as a blip on the radar.

A bulldozer does spread radioactivity when it moves soil at a construction site, if the soil is it moving has higher concentrations of radiation than the surrounding environment.

The radioactive part of coal is retained in the ash which has the same content as the soil it originally was.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was always under the impression that the soil coal is extracted from has higher levels of lots of stuff, primarily coal, in it. Some of it ends ends up in coal slurry and some of it ends up in coal ash.

Was also going explain how burning the coal concentrates the level of radiation in the coal ash, but I think the United States Geological Survey has it covered:

The average ash yield of coal burned in the United States is approximately 10 weight percent. Therefore, the concentration of most radioactive elements in solid combustion wastes will be approximately 10 times the concentration in the original coal.

Now yes the initial level of nastiness is slow low that a 10 time increase don't make it toxic waste. But the argument that burning coal increases the level of radiation in the surrounding area is sound. Whether that increase is sufficient to cause health effects is a whole other argument.

Your wrong. You confusing "proved" reserves with known reserves. "Proved" means we have already drilled there. If you include everything the geologists know about then we have the worlds largest oil reserves. "According to the Institute for Energy Research, we have more than 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable oil in the U. S., which is enough oil to meet all our needs for the next 200 years."

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40872.pdf
http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20120323/OPINION02/120322010/Difference-between-proven-recoverable-oil-reserves?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CFrontpage%7Cs
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
http://www.boemre.gov/revaldiv/RedNatAssessment.htm

From what I've read, the environmental damage is "minor; some low level seismic activity and perhaps some pollution of water supplies. So charge a little more for the natural gas coming out of these rural (low population density) communities and pay for piped in water or buy them out.

Clean water is far more precious than cheap fuel.
The latest water number I could find is from 2005: Americans use 410 billion gallons of water per day (~9,762 million barrels)
The latest oil number I could find is from 2010: Americans use ~19.2 million barrels of oil per day

Based on usage, we can tolerate higher oil prices far easier than we can tolerate even slightly higher water prices.
Screw with our fresh water supply at your own peril

IN ADDITION TO the outrageous price we are paying for the oil,

Arguably, most of that price is the direct result of speculation and has nothing to do with actual supply/demand issues.
I recall reading somewhere that, in the past, the oil futures market was 70% actual demand and 30% speculation.
Now it's 70% speculation and 30% actual demand. If you want cheaper oil, force the speculators out of the market.

Detailed maps of valuable deposits would be proprietary, I should think. The US Geological Survey does provide maps of mineral resources.

Hmm. Does anyone know just how well the various resources of the United States have been mapped?

Google comes up with fantastically interesting stuff sometimes. And it's even safe for work!

Hmm. Perhaps you are right, but there is something going on above and beyond the math.

Allow me to match your anecdote.
I have also been near one of these wells during a frakking operation, I have family members who are close enough to one to watch while they are pumping.

There are cracks in the foundation of the house that only formed after the well went live, and the tremors that i've personally felt were considerably more active than "Just a big bang".

For the record, I live in Southern Louisiana. The entire southern half of the state is on so much mud that most of our population isn't even aware that we had a 5.3 quake last year, or that we have had 74 earthquakes with magnitude greater than 3.0 in the last 10 years and 4 greater than a 4.0 in the last 2 years.

However, everyone in the parish (our version of a county) knows when they start frakking at any of the 4 wells in the area. (to the point of commenting about it to the workers when they go to the grocery store after work).

It's not a nuclear bomb, but there is definitely some noticeable vibration.

Perhaps you are in a less geologically active area, or perhaps the company working your area is more responsible than BP:Amoco, but it doesn't change the fact that thousands of people have stories just like mine

Perhaps someone should start a kickstarter to fund some impartial research into this, starting by correlating recorded activity and epicenter data with known start and stop dates of wells going into and out of production.

All of this data is already available via sites like http://neic.usgs.gov and sonris, we just need someone to sit down and correlate it.

Hmm. Perhaps you are right, but there is something going on above and beyond the math.

Allow me to match your anecdote.
I have also been near one of these wells during a frakking operation, I have family members who are close enough to one to watch while they are pumping.

There are cracks in the foundation of the house that only formed after the well went live, and the tremors that i've personally felt were considerably more active than "Just a big bang".

For the record, I live in Southern Louisiana. The entire southern half of the state is on so much mud that most of our population isn't even aware that we had a 5.3 quake last year, or that we have had 74 earthquakes with magnitude greater than 3.0 in the last 10 years and 4 greater than a 4.0 in the last 2 years.

However, everyone in the parish (our version of a county) knows when they start frakking at any of the 4 wells in the area. (to the point of commenting about it to the workers when they go to the grocery store after work).

It's not a nuclear bomb, but there is definitely some noticeable vibration.

Perhaps you are in a less geologically active area, or perhaps the company working your area is more responsible than BP:Amoco, but it doesn't change the fact that thousands of people have stories just like mine

Perhaps someone should start a kickstarter to fund some impartial research into this, starting by correlating recorded activity and epicenter data with known start and stop dates of wells going into and out of production.

All of this data is already available via sites like http://neic.usgs.gov and sonris, we just need someone to sit down and correlate it.

So, if doing fraking "right" requires you to have perfect cement jobs everytime, then it isn't possible to do fraking right.

That's a pretty big "if". You could also say that the vast majority of gas wells are done perfectly, and a few had problems which needed to be fixed

Keep in mind that natural gas in water wells is very common throughout the Appalachians

Sounds to me like they were dumbing it down for people who find science "too hard".

Like...the Italian Government?

It doesn't help that this:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Scientist_says_he_predicted_Italy_earthquake,_was_ignored
happened a month before.

I'm used to this. I have this site bookmarked and amuse myself with all the colored squares:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqscanv/

There's always 3.0s and 4.0s on there. Does that mean CA is getting a 6.3 in a month? Might. I'd never bet on it though and the odds would be against it.

1. That's a typical method of irrigation in the US only in the loosest sense of the word 'typical'. What you've managed to find is a picture of an antique.

The fact remains that in large regions of the USA (and other countries for that matter) ground water is being depleted so aggressively it is causing land subsidence. The symptoms, ground water levels lowered by tens and even hundreds of feet, speak for them selves:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-103-03/
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/gwdepletion.html

I particularly liked the part about closing down runways at Edwards AF base because of fissures caused by ground water depletion. One should also keep in mind that farmers are far from being the only ones to contribute to this problem. Urban and industrial water wastage also plays a part.

1. That's a typical method of irrigation in the US only in the loosest sense of the word 'typical'. What you've managed to find is a picture of an antique.

The fact remains that in large regions of the USA (and other countries for that matter) ground water is being depleted so aggressively it is causing land subsidence. The symptoms, ground water levels lowered by tens and even hundreds of feet, speak for them selves:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-103-03/
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/gwdepletion.html

I particularly liked the part about closing down runways at Edwards AF base because of fissures caused by ground water depletion. One should also keep in mind that farmers are far from being the only ones to contribute to this problem. Urban and industrial water wastage also plays a part.

If we assume the first step as true, then cars are not the only thing that emit CO2, and in fact they're not even in the top 10. There are lots of other things that will make more difference to the climate if we cut them than cars.

Have you ever actually looked at the amount of CO2 and other pollutants released by automobiles. I have. I tallied the numbers back in 2008.

34,254,000 Tons of Hydrocarbons, 260,462,000 Tons of Carbon Monoxide, 30,707,400 Tons of Oxides of Nitrogen and 5,086,605,000 Tons of Carbon Dioxide. These numbers are from just one year and only from automobiles and light trucks. It doesn't include trains, ships, airplanes or factories.

http://deesuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/10/what-our-vehicles-leave-behind.html

We put out more carbon dioixide in three-five days than the entirely of volcanoes do in a year. http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2827

Would you like to rethink your statement.

OTOH, Just imagine this conversation:

Engineer 1: Man, this is boring.
Engineer 2: Yep, nothing happening.
Engineer 1: How many of those guns do we have around here anyway?
Engineer 2: Dunno, couple dozen. Home office just dropped off a bunch last week.
Engineer 1: How many of these things can we tie together anyway?
Engineer 2: Dunno, probably all of them, they just hook up with that cable.
Engineer 1: Think those guys at the Earthquake Monitoring Program are awake yet?
Engineer 2: Dunno, we could find out, I suppose.

I hate this "all-eggs-in-one-basket" argument for preserving the human race. It misses the point entirely, because in the bigger picture Earth is not a sustainable system. The Sun is getting brighter; in less than a billion years it will be too intense for Earth's oceans to continue to exist. Like Mars did in ages past, Earth is going to lose its water. On the other side of the balance, Earth's interior is cooling, geological activity is diminishing, and so volcanic replenishment of the atmosphere is slowly winding down.It is clear, at such time scales, that if the entirety of life on Earth is to avoid extinction then life must branch out off the planet. That means launching equipment and people to build massive, robust infrastructure. Crops. Botanical gardens. Zoos.

Except that space is HARD. It's really expensive to get there and it is a high-vacuum radiation hell. It would take a long time and an expensive, sustained effort to construct off-planet habitats - a *tremendous* amount of effort and money before there is any payoff at all.

On the other hand, for example the asteroid 16 Psyche contains enough metal to construct a solid cylinder fivekm in diameter stretching from here to the Moon. Or cover North America in a layer 280 meters thick.The resources available to an outer space civilization are great enough to insure that if outer space habitats do reach the point where they can expand and grow, the payoff would be big enough to sustain life past the death of the Sun.

We are half-way through the era of animals on Earth. There have been at least a half dozen mass extinctions since animals first started evolving a half-billion years ago; there will be more. The glaciers have grown and retreated dozens of times over the last two million years; they will return. Yellowstone is going to explode again. And again. And again. Time is not unlimited.

But we have time. Abundant fossil fuels, and the internet - we are right now living in the decades of maximum wealth. At some point, within a few decades, we will either run out of fuel or we will run out of the capacity to sink carbon emissions. When this happens, it will mean the end of a way of life. Maximum wealth *right now* means that *right now* is the best and possibly the only time to lift off. Life on Earth only gets one pass at the fossil fuel heritage; if the next extinction event brings us to a place where launching is not possible, life will have missed its chance.

I'm not a nutter, I am a realist. I'm certain that outer space settlements will not solve our current growth vs. environment problems - the payoff will come way too late for that. None of our current issues will be solved, or even mitigated, by vigorous and immediate launches into the great expanse. Nonetheless, if DNA is to avoid extinction we need to start moving now as rapidly as we can. Nothing else matters.

The cocoon we call Earth is going to wither; whether or not she gives birthbefore she dies is entirely in the hands of human civilization. Our civilization,right now, we're the only chance. Sure, leaving Eden is a horrible burden. Suckit up. We have to go. Now.

Or, we can continue toasting marshmallows at the planet's one-time-only oil burning party.

(and all the profit they made on iProducts, which were all made using conflict minerals)

Presumably you're saying that for some reason more than just "they contain tantalum capacitors", as tantalum isn't ipso facto a conflict mineral, unless you're counting Australian rules football and capoeira matches as "conflicts". E.g., perhaps most or all of the tantalum used in capacitors comes from those countries, or perhaps most or all of the tantalum used in capacitors used in Chinese factories comes from those countries, etc..

Actually, in 2009, Australian production dropped significantly ("The Government of Western Australia reported that tantalite production was 105 t of contained tantalum pentoxide (Ta2O5) in 2009 compared with 680 t of contained Ta2O5 in 2008 (Government of Western Australia, Department of Mines and Petroleum, 2010, p. 23)."), due to a mine suspending operation due to market conditions ("Talison Minerals Pty. Ltd. suspended production at the Wodgina Mine, the world’s leading producing operation of tantalum ore, owing to the global financial downturn and greater market share going to central Africa, where tantalum minerals were mined under conditions of armed conflict and human rights abuses [northeastern regions of Congo (Kinshasa)]."). So the chances that the tantalum in a capacitor was conflict tantalum went up substantially in 2009. Dunno what's happened since then. (See the Wikipedia article on coltan for summary tables.)

"You don't earn a single penny bombing out places in Afghanistan.
They don't even have oil."

But they do have rare earths. You didn't really believe they were doing it for free, do you?

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2936

That sounds fascinating. Please name the event it so we can google it.

Ok, it took me about 3 seconds on Google to find this page on the USGS website:

At the end of the last Ice Age, a finger of the Cordilleran ice sheet crept southward into the Idaho panhandle, forming a large ice dam that blocked the mouth of the Clark Fork River, creating a massive lake 2000 feet deep and containing more than 500 cubic miles of water. Glacial Lake Missoula stretched eastward for some 200 miles and contained more water than Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined. When the highest of these ice dams failed, lake water burst through, shooting out at a rate 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world.

This towering mass of water and ice literally shook the ground as it thundered toward the Pacific Ocean, stripping away hundreds of feet of soil and cutting deep canyons -- "coulees" -- into the underlying bedrock. With flood speeds approaching 65 miles per hour, the lake would have drained in as little as 48 hours.

There is probably a solution out there somewhere, but it will take many more years of research to get to, if it's even possible. Some people say it isn't.

There is possibly a solution out there, but I know of no law of nature that requires there to be a reliable precursor signal, let alone a single, reliable, universally applicable signal.

It is plausible that particular faults may have reliable precursors along particular segments, but that a different fault would have different local circumstances, resulting in that particular precursor being useless. For example, a fault between crystalline basement blocks could well have a strong resistivity response in advance of fracture ; but 5km along the fault, you could have it in water-wet sedimentary cover, with a completely different resistivity response to accumulating stress.

In short, you may have to study and understand every single fault, and develop a specific prediction plan for each segment of that fault. And the unknown faults, like the blind thrust that "went" in a late-last-century Californian quake? That's a Rumsfeldian (?) "known unknown."

The problem of false positives and false negatives plagues the field. Which is not being helped by the prosecution of the Italian seismologists. You wouldn't catch me entering the field (I'm an oilfield geologist - pays quite nicely, thank you).

See my post above for earthquake mitigation comments, and also comments on the expected death toll for the next Ganges valley mega-quake.

Concerning this particular work ... I'm reading T.F.Paper ... which discusses groudwater changes recorded over Izmit 1999 (a friend of mine slept through that earthquake after her eclipse-chasing holiday ; she's never lived it down), carbon monoxide emissions from the ground (Gujarat, 2001 ; 0.25ppmv - that might be visible on a diver's CO meter?) , a suggestion of (electronic) hole formation and movement into the atmosphere to explain the diverse phenomena ... well it's a rational hypothesis.

BUT ... it depends on there being a linkage between the highly strained region of rock and the surface. Which with dry(-ish) crystalline basement, I can believe. But put a cover of sediments, particularly several kilometres of alternating mud-rock and sandstone/ limestones on top of your strained fault surface, and ask for it to transmit material (ions, holes, gases from oxidised organic matter) at rates of several kilometres per day? That's not going to work very well, IMHO.

Anyway ... it's a proposal. Lets put it to the test. Did this family of phenomena work for Parkfield? Strange - they make precisely *no* mention of Parkfield. Which is peculiar, given the amount of data collected. Trouble is, the data isn't nice and clean ; there's a nice sort-of-weekly trend in pore pressure, for example.

It doesn't look likely to fly to me. You're the seismology bod - are you convinced?

There is probably a solution out there somewhere, but it will take many more years of research to get to, if it's even possible. Some people say it isn't.

There is possibly a solution out there, but I know of no law of nature that requires there to be a reliable precursor signal, let alone a single, reliable, universally applicable signal.

It is plausible that particular faults may have reliable precursors along particular segments, but that a different fault would have different local circumstances, resulting in that particular precursor being useless. For example, a fault between crystalline basement blocks could well have a strong resistivity response in advance of fracture ; but 5km along the fault, you could have it in water-wet sedimentary cover, with a completely different resistivity response to accumulating stress.

In short, you may have to study and understand every single fault, and develop a specific prediction plan for each segment of that fault. And the unknown faults, like the blind thrust that "went" in a late-last-century Californian quake? That's a Rumsfeldian (?) "known unknown."

The problem of false positives and false negatives plagues the field. Which is not being helped by the prosecution of the Italian seismologists. You wouldn't catch me entering the field (I'm an oilfield geologist - pays quite nicely, thank you).

See my post above for earthquake mitigation comments, and also comments on the expected death toll for the next Ganges valley mega-quake.

Concerning this particular work ... I'm reading T.F.Paper ... which discusses groudwater changes recorded over Izmit 1999 (a friend of mine slept through that earthquake after her eclipse-chasing holiday ; she's never lived it down), carbon monoxide emissions from the ground (Gujarat, 2001 ; 0.25ppmv - that might be visible on a diver's CO meter?) , a suggestion of (electronic) hole formation and movement into the atmosphere to explain the diverse phenomena ... well it's a rational hypothesis.

BUT ... it depends on there being a linkage between the highly strained region of rock and the surface. Which with dry(-ish) crystalline basement, I can believe. But put a cover of sediments, particularly several kilometres of alternating mud-rock and sandstone/ limestones on top of your strained fault surface, and ask for it to transmit material (ions, holes, gases from oxidised organic matter) at rates of several kilometres per day? That's not going to work very well, IMHO.

Anyway ... it's a proposal. Lets put it to the test. Did this family of phenomena work for Parkfield? Strange - they make precisely *no* mention of Parkfield. Which is peculiar, given the amount of data collected. Trouble is, the data isn't nice and clean ; there's a nice sort-of-weekly trend in pore pressure, for example.

It doesn't look likely to fly to me. You're the seismology bod - are you convinced?

In 2010 China produced 130,000 tons of neodymium. The next largest producer was India with 2700 tons and then Brazil 550 tons.

Source, USGS report: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/rare_earths/mcs-2011-raree.pdf

China produces 97% of rare-earths and is using significant export restrictions to create artificial scarcity to drive up the price and gain political power: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/concern-as-china-clamps-down-on-rare-earth-exports-1855387.html

Rare-earths (which are not particularly rare) must be extracted from, e.g., Bastnäsite by leeching with acid (e.g. hydrochloric is used in the USA productions but in China they just cook it in sulfuric acid) followed by a solvent extraction and various other steps. The Bastnäsite contains a mix of various rare-earths including thorium, which is radioactive. Thats not necessarily a problem but it does need to be managed. EPA shut down the Molycorp mine at Mountain Pass due to accidental discharge of radioactive waste.

The 1993 link on Wikipedia to an article by Alex Gabbard was not the original in print but instead a later inclusive article on the same topic that was written to go on that new WWW thing of the time. The 1978 Science article came after the Oak Ridge Newsletter articles and a PR campaign.
Also the page linked above links to the fly ash article on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash) that contains the line "Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey and others of radioactive elements in coal ash have concluded that fly ash compares with common soils or rocks and should not be the source of alarm.[37]" http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.pdf

Three vertical km is a long way for stresses to propagate, particularly in low-permeability formations.

Rocky Mountain Arsenal, bordering the city limits of Denver, tried disposing of liquid waste by injecting it 12,000 feet below the ground. The result was a series of damaging earthquakes in Denver, up to 5.0 - 5.5 magnitude. USGS wrote a report in 1990.

The Victorian warehouse at 1000 Bannock still shows steel L-braces affixed to the exterior to hold the brick building together from the 1967 earthquake damage -- notice also the long crack running clear through from the back wall diagonally up to the roof.

It wasn't just Denver. I was living in Leadville, CO at the time and some friends had a hobby mine that went into an old fault line. Gold concentrates where there are breaks in the rock because that's where the water moves. When those earthquakes started, the latter third of their mine collapsed (because it was into looser rock adjacent to the fault line). The first time they were like what? and dug it back out and started shoring it, and then the second one hit, and then the third... and they were completely freaked out because the earthquakes were happening on a very regular basis, since the deep well injection dumps were being done on like the third friday of the month, and the earthquakes were happening like half a day later, so they were having earthquakes on the third saturday of each month. Pretty weird. That ended up with them abandoning that mine, although once the Rocky Mountain News started writing articles about the connection between the Arsenal and the earthquakes, they stopped pumping crap down through the water table into the underlying rock.

There is an area in the North Dakota / Montana area that has relatively high seismic activity. There are no local networks in that area, though, because nobody lives there, so we don't see all of the small ones that happen. I'm not all that familiar with the area, but that's what I've heard. Source: from my professors--I'm a seismology grad student.

To see how a local network can affect the amount of earthquakes you're seeing, compare the USGS's earthquake map of the New Madrid Seismic Zone to CERI's map.

Yes WRT scaling up.

The very largest one they reported that they thought might be fracking related was 2.8

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/calculator.php
USGS seems to report that even if all the others had been about 2.8 it would have required 16,000 of them to be equivalent to a 5.6. And it changes fast. If they were only 2.5, that's apparently 45,000

As for what effect such a tiny release of energy would have for the larger quakes, no idea, but that seems pretty inconsequential.

North Dakota already has had earthquakes.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/north_dakota/history.php

https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/ndnotes/ndn4_h.htm

Rocky Mountain Arsenal, bordering the city limits of Denver, tried disposing of liquid waste by injecting it 12,000 feet below the ground. The result was a series of damaging earthquakes in Denver, up to 5.0 - 5.5 magnitude. USGS wrote a report in 1990.

The Victorian warehouse at 1000 Bannock still shows steel L-braces affixed to the exterior to hold the brick building together from the 1967 earthquake damage -- notice also the long crack running clear through from the back wall diagonally up to the roof.

Funny enough, that already happened. In 1811 a similar underwater eruption near the Azores.

While this island lies clearly within the territorial limits of the Canary Islands (Spain) the question of Lo'ihi is not so certain.

Lo'ihi is still some distance (~969 meters) below the surface, but growing steadily, and when it breaks the surface it will be 30km from the Big Island in Hawaii, which is well outside the US claimed 22km territorial limit. The chances of the US allowing anyone else to claim it are slim to none, but the precedent set in 1811 would pretty much assure the US will have boots on the ground before anyone else gets a chance.

While Hawaiian volcanoes are typically slow growing, Lo'ihi is thought to be fed by the same lava plume feeding the Mauna Loa and Kilauea volcanoes. Should the plume find easier going to the east, Lo'ihi could draw upon pretty vast resources and grow much faster.

People who write things down have inhabited Oklahoma for how long? 300 years? So this is the strongest earthquake in (say) 400 years?

If you seriously think that this quake has been brought into the attention span of humans by fracking, then you're implying that you also think that human civilisation in the area will be finished by about 2400 CE. Is that seriously what you're asserting? What are your reasons for holding this belief?
(Note the implicit equation of "writing things down" with "civilisation". Being shaken back to a pre-literate state is not the same as becoming extinct.)

In other news, I just checked my email and the earthquake reports say :

Region: OKLAHOMA
Geographic coordinates: 35.537N, 96.746W
Magnitude: 5.6 Mw
Depth: 5 km
Universal Time (UTC): 6 Nov 2011 03:53:10
Time near the Epicenter: 5 Nov 2011 22:53:10

This explains some people's confusion over the time of the event - some people some places can't (or won't) read English.

Actually, on the basis of that, I'm just wondering if the same non-readers have checked the historical seismicity records, or just relied on regurgitating someone else's assertion.

From the USGS information page,

Earthquakes are not unusual in Oklahoma, but they often are too small to be felt.

So, pretty normal then.

In 2009 the rate of seismicity continued to climb, with nearly 50 earthquakes recorded--many big enough to be felt. In 2010 this activity continued. The magnitude 4.7 and 5.6 earthquakes of November 5, 2011, are the largest events recorded during this period of increased seismicity. Additionally, the M5.6 quake is the largest quake to hit Oklahoma in modern times.

OK, so the "biggest quake" is the USGS's opinion too ; that's good enough for me. The intensifying series of quakes is interesting. (OK, I'm a geologist, but I do get out a lot! It's still interesting.)

The Meers fault located in south-central Oklahoma, about 100 km southwest of Oklahoma City, is the only fault identified in the state with evidence of surface-rupturing earthquakes in the last 3000 years (prior to historical settlement of the region). Paleoseismology studies have identified a temporal clustering of a least three earthquakes on this fault, two of which are dated (1200-2900 years before present) and the third is believed to be older in age.

Surface rupturing - cracks in the ground that swallow screaming Hollywood starlets - are only common in pretty substantial earthquakes. More substantial than the mid-5s that are being reported for this "strongest quake in historical times." So ... within the last pretty short period, there have been stronger quakes in the region. Quelle surprise! Not.

An earthquake of magnitude 5.6 like the one that occurred yesterday east of Oklahoma City, are believed to be capable of striking anywhere in eastern North America at irregular intervals.

Queen Anne's dead. Tell us news, not history.

That increasing series of quakes is very interesting. Could we (sorry, "you", to the Americans in the audience) be building up to another New Madrid type earthquake? That would be valuable - there hasn't yet been a major intra-plate earthquake occur in the presence of a good seismological network. Here's hoping!

As a child, I would go to Mammoth Mountain with my family to camp and fish. I loved the trees there. One year, as an adult, I took my girl friend to see how beautiful it was. I took her to heart lake and all around I saw that the trees were dead. I asked a park ranger, "wtf?" He told me that the volcano was producing so much carbon dioxide that it was killing the trees. I said, "wtf? CO2 is food for trees". He said, "you're right. But in this case it's too much of a good thing."

I'm not on board with the whole "man-made climate change" guys and I post this simply to educate. I personally believe if there is warming, it's because we're at the end of an ice age (thanks for the mod down).

But here's a link to the issues at Mammoth Mountain. http://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-81/Intro/facts-sheet/GasKillingTrees.html

You mean like this? The location is from the USGS Earthquake Page showing the locations of the recent Oklahoma earthquakes. Is that a gas well right next to the quake location (that "bright square pad")? And could those be fault lines in the background?

It's hard to tell exactly what's on it, but I see a pad with what looks to be four tanks just north of there. It looks like it has a few horizontal and vertical separators too. Major hydrofracturing activity in Oklahoma is centered around other places though.. McAlester, El Reno and Elk City.

The kinds of wells that are known to be quake-causing, according to my geophysicist friend, are water disposal wells. These will have lots of tanks, often 10-20 tanks, for storage buffering. It will also conspicuously have electricity leading to the site to power the injection pumps.

The XY location of the quakes has an uncertainty of 8 miles. The depth was something a little less than a mile uncertainty. So you don't need to look *right* by the given epicenter. I don't think that particular facility could be responsible for releasing several high-magnitude quakes, when compared to what has been causing problems in Arkansas and Texas.

Those ridges may or may not be fault lines.. there is another phenomena that formed those here, the dust bowl. They're all over the place, so I can't say for sure, you'd have to consult the USGS maps. I think there is a fault line through Lincoln County.

Probably Google maps are too outdated to show a recent problem well, in hindsight. I'm curious what kind of operations are in the area, because I've never been there for work, but I have been nearly everywhere in the state where there are major operations going on. Based on the Prague homepage, it looks to be a depleted field, and I wouldn't expect any major hydrofracturing or disposal activity there.

...I don't think there's a lot of that kind of activity in that area. If you check the satellite maps you can verify that, wells stand out as bright square pads.

You mean like this? The location is from the USGS Earthquake Page showing the locations of the recent Oklahoma earthquakes. Is that a gas well right next to the quake location (that "bright square pad")? And could those be fault lines in the background?