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Energy Production Causes Big US Earthquakes

Posted by Soulskill on from the please-don't-break-the-planet dept.

ananyo writes "Natural-gas extraction, geothermal-energy production and other activities that inject fluid underground have caused numerous earthquakes in the United States, scientists have reported in a trio of papers in Science (abstracts here, here and here). Most of these quakes have been small, but some have exceeded magnitude 5.0. They include a magnitude-5.6 event that hit Oklahoma on 6 November 2011, damaging 14 homes and injuring two people."

6 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. But ... But ... But ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Time and time again on Slashdot, we've had extraction engineers that work on this say it's completely safe and anyone who says otherwise is fear mongering!

    Clearly these ivory tower scientists are just confused old men because the natural gas companies have absolutely no motive to try to silence this kind of stuff ;-)

    1. Re:But ... But ... But ... by Sesostris+III · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So, the position has shifted from "extraction doesn't cause earthquakes" to "OK, extraction causes earthquakes but these are good earthquakes"!

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      You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
    2. Re:But ... But ... But ... by idontgno · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "I'm sorry I burned down your house, but the underbrush and dead trees were building up, so it's all for the better that I was playing with these matches and burned some of it off before it built up and caused a REAL fire. You know, the kind that would have burned down your neighborhood instead of just your house. Hey, put down that gun!"

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
  2. Earthquakes and global warming around us but by denis-The-menace · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Earthquakes and global warming around us but who cares, we're getting rich, right?

    It's that what matters? /s (-- For the Sarcasm impaired)

    --
    Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
  3. But isn't this a good thing? by sanermind · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But isn't the advantage... that by lubricating faults what's happening is that built up tension is being released sooner, rather than later when it's built up even more?

    Honestly, this ought to be seen as an advantage. More frequent smaller earthquakes are most likely very prefereable to infrequent but much larger earthquakes.

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    the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
  4. Now I get it! by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Insightful
    When the oil and natural gas companies were talking about fracking being the ground breaking research and earth shaking breakthrough this is what they were talking about it looks like.

    This is a great opportunity for any one with a PhD in seismology wanting to make some money. All you have to do is to say, "these earthquakes did not come from fracking" or "these small earthquakes release the stress energy being built up in these faults. Relieving the strain in numerous small quakes actually ease the faults and make the possibility of large quakes less not more". That is it, a whole sister industry to climate-change-denial industgry will spring up around such people. The miniquake deniers will hang on to the public pronouncement in front of TV cameras by a few people in labcoats as gospel and shrug off peer reviewed research by every one else.

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact