Scientists Link Deep Wells To Deadly Spanish Quake

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Scientists Link Deep Wells To Deadly Spanish Quake

Posted by timothy on Sunday October 21, 2012 @02:39PM from the better-tell-those-guys-in-russia dept.

Meshach writes "Research has suggested that human activity triggered an earthquake in Spain that killed nine and injured over three hundred. Drilling deeper and deeper wells to water crops over the past 50 years were identified as the culprit by scientist who examined satellite images of the area. It was noted that even without the strain caused by water extraction, a quake would likely have occurred at some point in the area but the extra stress of pumping vast amounts of water from a nearby aquifer may have been enough to trigger a quake at that particular time and place."

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Span? by aitikin · 2012-10-21 14:41 · Score: 4, Insightful

Where the hell is Span?

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1. Re:Span? by Hsien-Ko · 2012-10-21 14:42 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  In Euroe
2. Re:Span? by The+MAZZTer · 2012-10-21 14:43 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Inside of Body somewhere, which in turn is inside Html.
3. Re:Span? by Jason+Levine · 2012-10-21 14:49 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  It's where the ran falls manly on the plan.
  
  --
  My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
4. Re:Span? by Psychotria · 2012-10-21 14:53 · Score: 2
  
  Where the hell is Span?
  It is country named by scientist. In fact, scientist was the same as culprit.
5. Re:Span? by guttentag · 2012-10-21 15:08 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Where the hell is Span?
  Google says it's between a rock (Gibraltar) and a hard place to publish Web search results (France).
6. Re:Span? by Ukab+the+Great · 2012-10-21 15:23 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  It's located somewhere in Div
7. Re:Span? by LordLucless · 2012-10-21 16:22 · Score: 2
  
  Just three levels deep? What an optimist.
  
  --
  Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
8. Re:Span? by c0lo · 2012-10-21 16:46 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Where the hell is Span?
  Relevant citation:
  
  The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm
  
  --
  Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
In other news... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-21 14:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

Research has suggest that in most cases, murder is directly related to getting out of bed.
It's too complicated for me to understand ... by Taco+Cowboy · 2012-10-21 14:57 · Score: 5, Insightful

From TPA:

Research has suggested that human activity triggered an earthquake

Umm ...

It was noted that even without the strain caused by water extraction, a quake would likely have occurred at some point in the area

Please pardon me, perhaps I am being too dense to understand the following intricacies:
How can it be that "Human activity triggered an earthquake" when a quake "would likely have occurred at some point in the area" ?

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1. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by R3d+M3rcury · 2012-10-21 15:09 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  How can it be that "Human activity triggered an earthquake" when a quake "would likely have occurred at some point in the area" ?
  Imagine I pull out a gun and shoot you. Well, you would have died eventually anyway, right?
2. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by Gaygirlie · 2012-10-21 15:11 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Please pardon me, perhaps I am being too dense to understand the following intricacies:
  How can it be that "Human activity triggered an earthquake" when a quake "would likely have occurred at some point in the area" ?
  The difference is in the timing, what with human activity triggering it to happen now, or it happening on its own in a few hundred years in the future.
3. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-21 15:14 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Translation: Humans cause it to happen *earlier* then it would have occurred naturally. They acted as the last triggering point rather then the natural stress buildup.
  Adding stress when stress is already slowly building up is the same as this example.
  A cup put underneath a running faucet. You adding extra water into the cup causing it to spill. That means that you caused it to spill, even if we know the cup would spill anyways due to the running faucet.
  As for if this was a bad thing or not, who knows. It's possible that the extra stress could have cause the earthquake to be weaker then it would have been if it just slowly buildup to even higher levels. It could have also make the quake stronger compared to say if it naturally just caused several quakes instead of 1 giant one. Since it didn't occur naturally, it's all what ifs at this point.
4. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by cheater512 · 2012-10-21 15:22 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Most quake prone areas have a frequency in single digit years, not hundreds of years.
  Hell the bad areas can have quakes on a monthly or weekly basis.
  Humans don't cause quakes, we can only trigger them.
  The stress was there with or without the pumping, and that stress must be relieved.
5. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by Jartan · 2012-10-21 15:30 · Score: 2
  
  In English the word "triggered" is not related to cause. Humans merely finished tipping a wobbling domino.
6. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by StormyWeather · 2012-10-21 15:33 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  the interesting question is if triggering it sooner made it less severe or more severe.
7. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by Anubis+IV · 2012-10-21 15:34 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Eh, I'd prefer to use the analogy of pushing a boulder down a hill at his house, rather than waiting for erosion to do it a few years later. With a gun, you're changing how it happens and introducing all sorts of other complications. Even better, if we want to remove intent from the equation, maybe my house was next to the boulder and I left a hose running, which washed away the dirt under the boulder, leading to its cascading down the hillside into his house. While naturally-occurring erosion would've done the same job eventually, I just helped it along with some human-caused erosion.
8. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by Luckyo · 2012-10-21 16:06 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  There is also a question of location. Drilling for water in populated area may have shifted epicenter of the quake closer to the population center in question.
9. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by Gaygirlie · 2012-10-21 17:35 · Score: 2
  
  But you were throwing out that humans moved it up a few hundred years.
  It was just to make the point that humans triggered it to happen now instead of later.
  
  You are only stupid for trying to spin things to make man "evil".
  Where? I didn't take a stance either way in the whole thing. Geesh. You sure are oversensitive over this.
10. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by Solandri · 2012-10-21 18:35 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  This one's a bit different from the quakes caused by fracking. In fracking, they just fracture the rocks and inject a fluid, basically lubricating the ground. There's almost no energy added to the system. So while the fracking may trigger a quake, it is not the root cause (all the energy released was already there). Any energy released from a fracking quake is energy which was already there.
  
  In this one they removed large quantities of water from the aquifer. While technically no energy was added to the system, the water's removal lowered the potential energy floor, essentially adding the potential energy of the now-too-high ground to any stress energy which had already been built up (if any).
  
  An analogue to this case would be sinkholes caused by extracting or receding water from underground aquifers/caves. The removal of the water itself directly causes the sinkhole, or in this case the quake. Depending on the quantity of water removed (and thus the distance the ground above had to "settle"), there might not even have been any natural fault slippage involved, and this quake could have been entirely manmade.
11. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by xenobyte · 2012-10-21 19:26 · Score: 2
  
  Please pardon me, perhaps I am being too dense to understand the following intricacies:
  How can it be that "Human activity triggered an earthquake" when a quake "would likely have occurred at some point in the area" ?
  It's the Global Warming standard. If Human Activity can cause something, it is beyond any doubt or hesitation Human Activity that's at fault. It doesn't matter if other causes are more likely, nor that similar Human Activity has been done for decades elsewhere with no ill effects. Oh, and Occams Razor be damned.
  
  --
  "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
12. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by AmiMoJo · 2012-10-21 19:36 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Legally the only question is if this makes the people doing the drilling responsible for the damage caused by the earthquake. In previous cases involving things like erosion the answer has generally been "yes", even if the damage was inevitable.
  
  --
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  SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
13. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by Alioth · 2012-10-21 22:55 · Score: 2
  
  This isn't really a quake prone area (that's to say, prone to quakes of any significant strength). You can tell by the age of the buildings - don't forget that this city is hundreds of years older than the United States, and many of its buildings (that are NOT built in earthquake-proof manners) have stood for centuries. The castle, built over 1200 years ago, suffered structural damage to its ancient walls. So it's entirely possible that the quake was triggered hundreds of years early. It's also possible that the epicentre and strength of the earthquake may have been different due to the water extraction, and it was described to have been "unusually shallow" so the severity (in terms of damage) may have been elevated compared to if it had happened at its natural date.
  
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14. Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... by drinkypoo · 2012-10-21 23:55 · Score: 2
  
  Certainly this is true of quake damage here in the USA, at least in California.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Anthropogenic Earthquake Theory by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-21 15:28 · Score: 3, Funny

The Anthropogenic Earthquake Theory is a myth! There is no evidence that mankind's efforts have any effect whatsoever on earthquakes! Face the facts, people, Earth is big, man is small! There is no way that these--
Wait, did you say water wells?
Oh. Nevermind.
Attention All Humans! by sycodon · 2012-10-21 16:05 · Score: 3, Insightful

Stop! Drop whatever it is you are fucking doing RIGHT NOW because whatever it is, some scientists you are going to fuck some other shit up.
Just freeze and don't move, or we're all going to fucking DIE!

--
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Drilling deeper and deeper. by Z00L00K · 2012-10-21 16:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

That also means that they are consuming more water than what is replenished each year, which in the long run may be a more important issue than a quake every 25 years or so.

--
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Usually caused by adding water by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-21 16:52 · Score: 5, Informative

Human-induced earthquakes are usually caused by water injection, or more precisely by increasing pore fluid pressure which in turn has the effect of decreasing the rock's confining pressure. Basically, the water inside the rock pushes out in all directions with a (typically very high) pressure related to the height of the water column in hydrostatic communication with it above. The rock above is also pushing down, but other considerations aside, this confining pressure from the weight of the rocks tends to lock faults together preventing them from moving. The effective confining pressure is reduced by the pore fluid pressure pushing the rock apart. If you add to the water column the extra weight of the water may be minuscule compared to the increase in pressure caused by the greater height of the water column. That extra pore water pressure can then allow other forces, previously held in check by the rock's confining pressure, to break the fault causing an earthquake.
The most common place for this to occur is in filling new reservoirs and in deep waste injection wells used for disposal of fluids from oil and gas production. Suck quakes are usually very small, but I think they've been observed in rare cases above magnitude 5.
Removing water is a much less common cause of earthquakes. Pumping, for both water and oil, can ground subsidence, but rarely earthquakes. It will, however, subtly affect the balance of forces on a fault, so it's not inconceivable that it could cause a fault already near the breaking point to slip. I'd be curious to see the fault geometry and movement on the fault that caused the earthquake in Span.
1. Re:Usually caused by adding water by camg188 · 2012-10-22 02:46 · Score: 2
  
  Another thing I noticed: The article claims [no citation given] that the water table has dropped 250m in the past 50 years, but according to the USGS the quake epicenter was 1km below the surface. So unless the region started off with a water table below 750m (very doubtful), the epicenter was still below the water table.
  Also according to the same USGS page, the root cause was (no surprise) plate tectonics:
  
  The southeastern Spain earthquake of 11 May, 2011, occurred within the plate boundary region that separates the Eurasia and Africa (Nubia) plates. At the longitude of the earthquake, the Africa plate moves NW with respect to the Eurasia plate with a velocity of 6 mm/yr.
Re:No, I haven't. by Maow · 2012-10-21 17:18 · Score: 3, Interesting

I've heard of Spic in Span though. Is that where you're thinking of?
No, Spic and Span is what I meant.
Although it appears that it's seen on the official web site's title as Spic 'n Span, but that's missing an apostrophe. The product appears to say Spic and Span.
Like how people abbreviate "until" to "till" instead of "'til" - missing the apostrophe and adding a letter L, making it a different word (till as in cash till, or verb: to till the land, etc.)
Or, better example, Rock 'n Roll.
Interesting tidbit from World Wide Words, via Wikipedia:

A spick was a spike or nail, a span was a very fresh wood chip, and thus the phrase meant clean and neat and all in place, as in being nailed down. The "span" in the idiom also is part of "brand span new," now more commonly rendered "brand spanking new."
Re:Water Table Lowered 250 Meters! by MyLongNickName · 2012-10-22 01:21 · Score: 2

Yes, I also find it hard to believe that they've drawn down water 1/4 kilometer. That is just amazingly bad.
The other hard-to-believe is how a 5.1 earthquake did so much damage. How poor are the building standards in Spain?

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