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Energy Production Causes Big US Earthquakes
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."
Sink holes all over Illinois due to aquifer tapping leads me to say: You're surprised?
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You can prevent large earthquakes by making lots of small ones, or by "lubricating" the fault with water.
FICTION: Seismologists have observed that for every magnitude 6 earthquake there are about 10 of magnitude 5, 100 of magnitude 4, 1,000 of magnitude 3, and so forth as the events get smaller and smaller. This sounds like a lot of small earthquakes, but there are never enough small ones to eliminate the occasional large event. It would take 32 magnitude 5's, 1000 magnitude 4's, OR 32,000 magnitude 3's to equal the energy of one magnitude 6 event. So, even though we always record many more small events than large ones, there are far too few to eliminate the need for the occasional large earthquake. As for "lubricating" faults with water or some other substance, if anything, this would have the opposite effect. Injecting high- pressure fluids deep into the ground is known to be able to trigger earthquakes—to cause them to occur sooner than would have been the case without the injection. This would be a dangerous pursuit in any populated area, as one might trigger a damaging earthquake.
Where have I heard that? "The earth isn't warming" to "Ok it's warming but that's a good thing" or "Evolution doesn't happen" to "Ok micro-evolution happens".
My real concern is that I find myself with less and less of an open mind listening to some people. And it doesn't really matter whether it's left or right, but there are a lot of people who simply refuse to ever be wrong about anything. So they keep changing their argument rather that accepting the flaws in the world-view. I find they are often wrong a lot. If you tell me you are 100% certain about something, I'm likely to doubt you. Simply because people who assert certainty tend not to know much. Ignorance breeds certainty and knowledge breeds doubt.
I got called a coward the other day for not making an argument about something because I didn't know enough about it. I guess I'm different in that I don't confuse my opinions for facts. Actually, I don't even believe in the concept of facts as an absolute. There are merely observations, the perception of those observations and theories about those observations. Facts are for children.