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Utah Desalinization Plant Causes Earthquake

Posted by Hemos on from the ka-WHAM dept.

mknewman writes "A Utah desalinization plant which removes 260 gallons of salty brine from a river which feeds the Colorado river has caused a 3.9 on the Richter Scale earthquake, noticeable by people 60 miles away in Grand Junction. More information at http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/11/15/earthqu ake.wellpumpin.ap/index.html"

7 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Reminds me of... by krymsin01 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Reminds me of something I heard about a geothermal generator near Cloverdale, CA. They have at least one earthquake a week because the station pumps water down into the ground to create steam to power their turbines. Take a look at this earthquake map. It's a map of all earthquakes in the California/Nevada area for the past week. Check out the area around Cloverdale. There will ALWAYS be at least one quake per week in that area.

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    stuff
  2. COOOOL by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 3, Interesting
    For someone who grew up with nuclear movies, in wich every problem was solved or involved nukes, this is very very nice.

    Just don't think it would make a good James Bond movie. "Ah yes Mister Bond I see you managed to find my secret water pump!".

    On a more serious note, it is known that taking gas or oil from the earth causes the ground above to sink. In the netherlands this is happening up north although the effects are of course very small according to those in power (and living above sea level).

    It also causes some small earth quakes. Nothing major. Last one had all the news channels trying to make a story out of some rooftiles that slid off. We don't get good disasters here anymore.

    If this causes a lot of earthquakes because it lubricates the faults might it not be used to untension high risk areas? Put some lubricant in the ground wich causes a lot of small earth quakes to take energy away from the ground so there is not enough left for a big one?

    I have no idea how lethal a 3.9 is but it must be a hell of a lot better for places like LA then a 8.

    What do you mean this is potentially very dangerous. You are talking about a city that got nuclear reactors in an earthquake zone. They like danger over there.

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    1. Re:COOOOL by El · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If this causes a lot of earthquakes because it lubricates the faults might it not be used to untension high risk areas? Put some lubricant in the ground wich causes a lot of small earth quakes to take energy away from the ground so there is not enough left for a big one? Well, yes. IIRC, there was a proposal to run down the San Andreas Fault pumping water into holes while simultaneously pumper water out of holes on either side; the theory being that this would let the fault slip a little bit at a time, and therefore prevent a large earthquake from occuring. (Can anybody cite a reference to this?) Not sure why this was never actually done, although the costs of drilling and pumping would be high, the costs of an earthquake would be higher. Probably it was decided that we simply don't understand the mechanism well enough to predict exactly what will happen.

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  3. A related article.... by hustin · · Score: 5, Interesting


    Wired had an article the other day regarding the environmental impacts of another desalination plant, this one in Arizona.

  4. It has happended before in the Denver area by cruff · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Back in the late 1960s or early 1970s, there was some injection of water into wells in the Denver area (I forget if it was at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant or at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal nerve gas/pesticide site). It resulted in the same types of low level earthquakes. I recall one morning, while I was carrying my full bowl of cereal into the living room to watch the cartoons, a magnitude 4 (or thereabouts) earthquake struck. I had to stop to prevent my cereal bowl from spilling milk onto the floor. The water injection was stopped, but I don't recall if it was to prevent further earthquakes or some other reason.

  5. Why did we build this? by MobyDisk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What is the purpose of this desalinization plant? The article says "The process is intended to decrease the salt content of the Colorado River downstream..." but why would we want to do that? If the purpose was to remove it for human consumption, I would understand. But that doesn't seem to be the case if it is just removing the salt for the downstream river.

    This whole thing reminds me of the Rhine River which was straightened so it flowed faster, causing massive erosion and removing the natural process of detoxifing the water. Eventually, the river had to be un-straightened to fix the problem.

  6. The really interesting part... by __aavljf5849 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...is that this is a cheap way of causing earth quakes. Why would you want to do that, you ask? Well, besides the obvious reason of being an evil villain in a Bond-movie, you could also do this to make small earthquakes to disperse the tension in the crust, thereby averting big buildups that evetually get released in big, disastrous earthquakes.

    Of course this would need to be tested somewhere safe. Are there any major fault lines in the antarctic?