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Seismological Society of America Claims Fracking Reactivated Ohio Fault
eldavojohn writes There have been suspicions that fracking has caused minor earthquakes in Ohio but last year seismic data recorded by the Earthscope Transportable Array was analyzed by the Seismological Society of America using template matching and has resulted in a new publication and press release making the statement that Hilcorp Energy's fracking in Poland Township in March of 2014 "did not create a new fault, rather it activated one that we didn't know about prior to the seismic activity." The earthquakes occurred in the Precambrian basement and lead the researchers to posit that further unknown faults may be activated by fracking. The press release ends with urging for "close cooperation among government, industry and the scientific community as hydraulic fracturing operations expand in areas where there's the potential for unknown pre-existing faults."
Despite there being no published science about its safety, and despite evidence that it is actually polluting wells and ground water ... it will keep happening.
Because government officials are all paid heavily by the oil and gas industry to make damned sure they can do anything they want to, right up to tearing up private property because they want to.
These short sighted clowns only care about profits, and don't give a damn about anything else.
I can't imagine government is going to start reigning in corporations any time soon ... which means all laws and policy will continue to be so skewed in favor of corporations as to be laughable.
America is nothing but an oligarchy these days.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
what if causing a number of small earthquakes prolongs the release of a large one. Less energy is being pent up so the slippage should do less damage
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I told the Precambrian family not to install a basement. But did they listen? Noooooo.
Well then... this is obviously their fault.
The middle east producers are most certainly NOT dropping prices.
The prices are dropping because there's a lot of it around, and because whatever vagaries in the market say the price goes down.
What the middle east producers are doing is refusing to cut outputs in the face of dropping prices, because they have tons of cash and don't care if it puts American producers out of business.
OPEC doesn't set the price, just output levels.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Don't the mini quakes release energy from the faults more safely?
mini quakes along active fault lines release pent-up energy that protects against "the big one" -- but a dormant fault is like a healed over fracture in your bone -- if nothing disturbs it, it will continue to heal over. Now that it is active again, this will cause a chain reaction of stresses that will likely have continental and possibly global consequences, as it changes the way the other faults interact with each other.
Basically, it made all the related fracture lines that much less predictable.
Citing "Australia right now" in support of "Global Warming" (also known as "Climate Change") is ridiculous
Maybe, unless you have insight into the trends and Australia Now is consistent with those trends. Extremes that would have happened about 2% of the time in the 30 years prior to the 80's were happening about 6% of the time in the 30 years prior to 2010. In the last 15 years they have occurred about 10% of the time: http://www.bom.gov.au/state-of... . This trend of increasing extremes is what we would expect in a warming country: http://www.bom.gov.au/state-of...
The picture becomes even more cohesive if you look at the temperature trend in the context of radiative physics and what we know about the atmospheric CO2 trend.