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Deadly 1933 Long Beach Earthquake May Have Been Caused By Oil Drilling, Says Study (latimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: A new study suggests that the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, the deadliest seismic event in recorded Southern California history, may have been caused by deep drilling in an oil field in Huntington Beach. The study, written by two leading U.S. Geological Survey scientists in Pasadena and to be published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America on Tuesday, also suggests that three other earthquakes, including magnitude 5.0 earthquakes in 1920 in Inglewood and in 1929 in Whittier, may also be linked to oil drilling. The two government scientists, Susan Hough and Morgan Page, wrote the report after a review of nearly forgotten state oil drilling records. They discovered that the epicenter of some of the Los Angeles Basin's largest earthquakes between 1900 and 1935 happened shortly after significant changes were made in oil production in nearby fields. During this era, the Los Angeles area was one of the world's leading oil producers. The report's finding does not mean that oil drilling is causing earthquakes in Southern California today. The study only focused on earthquakes between 1900 and 1935. Different scientists have looked at earthquakes during more recent decades and have not found any reason to blame oil production for triggering earthquakes more recently in the L.A. Basin. The reason could be that oil drilling practices in the L.A. Basin have changed dramatically since the years when oil was first discovered in this region, and today's techniques may be safer and thus unlikely to trigger earthquakes as they might have done long ago. The Long Beach earthquake killed about 120 people and caused major damage throughout the region. It was named the Long Beach earthquake because the worst damage occurred in that city, even though the epicenter of the earthquake was actually in the Huntington Beach area. The quake destroyed many brick buildings, and prompted officials to ban new construction of unreinforced brick buildings.
That's impossible. We all know fossil fuel extraction is totally harmless and that Christ himself protects people from such things.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Reading the article, it doesn't sound like this study is based on anything other than correlation. X happened, and Y happened at around the same place, at around the same time. There's no real description of mechanisms, or proposed experiments that could validate a mechanism, or predictions that could be validated against future events.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
120 people offed in a quake is a good start, but minor compared to what could be accomplished with better planning
and a couple of surplus warheads.
- Dr. Zorin
Strange. Removing the oil from the ground should minimize tectonic shifts when the lubricant goes missing?
Sorry folks, too lazy (and too many beers) to look up the correlations - but it only stands to reason that if you damage (drill, extract, frack) the foundations, then the results invariably will lead to ground resettling for the area(s) above these operations i.e.earthquakes in the areas being destabilized by drilling (cracking / shattering the foundation with the bore-holes), extraction (removing substantial parts of the foundation materials), and fracking (literally fracturing the foundation to release hydrocarbon elements bound into the rocks).
I'm going to have to go with the 'greeners' and the environmentalists on this issue.
redneck geek
You sure? I thought it was caused by the Russians...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Remember when slashdot did science and technology threads instead of random SJW propaganda? Me either. If oil drilling could cause such a thing, then it was going to happen anyway.
Look up observational/survey research and learn something.
I'm not a seismologist but I've done some geologic work (with and for geologists). Most of us know that an earthquake is the shock wave produced when there's movement along a fault line. There must be differential pressure between the 2 (or more) masses, and as the pressure builds something eventually gives, movement happens, and we have our quake. That 1930s drilling easily could have been the "straw that broke the camel's back", but certainly could not have been the sole cause of the quake. TFA alludes to this. It's impossible to say when the quake would have happened on its own, but tectonic pressure caused the quake.
But no, I wasn't there at the time. In my time we had a little of the original 1920s construction, some post-earthquake buildings, and some new postwar structures.
But it might reduce severity of earthquakes by releasing stress in a series of smaller quakes - so maybe we should be fracking just to reduce the impact of earthquakes.
Earthquakes are caused by massive amounts of energy built up by the movement of tectonic plates. Drilling for oil, geothermal drilling, fracking, etc. do not add enough energy to "cause" a quake, even through ground settling. They can trigger a quake to happen earlier than it would have naturally, but that's just releasing energy that would've been released at some time in the future as a natural earthquake.
Blaming earthquakes on drilling is like blaming the camel's broken back on the straw. The straw may have triggered the back to break, but it didn't cause it. All the other stuff piled up on the camel before the straw was 99.99% responsible for causing it.
Relative to the total mass of the affected area, a puny oil well drilled in the ground is just "noise" and totally insignificant. But the story is what we have come to expect from the "scientific" community: total fabrication , with "facts" manufactured to fit a foregone conclusion and agenda.
Does a murderer cause a victim's death or trigger it? The victim would have died "at some time in the future as a natural" death.
Seriously, stop the drilling!
I mean, come on, can't hemp provide what cars crave?
Plant more /r/trees!
Ground resettling != Deadly earthquake. Since a few years we have our share of earthquakes, in a region with pretty much zero natural geological activity. These are minor: small amounts of energy released relatively close to the surface, resulting in small quakes of a magnitude between 2 and 3. But because these happen so close to the surface, they still do damage (in a small area). This is a simple case: pretty much everybody (including the oil companies) agrees that the quakes are caused by large scale gas production in the region since the 50s
When it comes to these deadly quakes, things are not so simple. The amounts of energy released are such that this cannot be explained merely by subsidence of the overburden. It is possible, as others have pointed out, that this subsidence has triggered a bigger quake... one that was already waiting to happen.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
My GF felt the earth move after I did some of my own "drilling".
Everything I've read and heard on the recent earthquakes is that re-injection of spent water is as likely if not more likely the culprit than the actual extraction, particularly at high pressure near faults: http://news.stanford.edu/2015/...
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
Here we go again. "could have been changed forever" Just like liberals saying sharks still circle an area in the Atlantic Ocean, where slave ships dumped slaves bound for the America's. Oh, by the way, the AFRICAN people put their own in slavery...others just bought them.
Oh, by the way, the AFRICAN people put their own in slavery
The slavers were mainly North African Arabs. So WTF is up with African Americans adopting Islam?
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/414a23a31fbde0335f2109ce5d5038284f5f0ec006598a6001ff992edb5a6bec.jpg
OK, I wasn't there for the 1933 earthquake. Along the coastline of Huntington Beach there is this granitic escarpment that we surfers in the 1960s lovingly called The Cliffs -- before they put in the staircase. This is part of the Inglewood Fault Line.
Yet the epicenter occurred offshore from the outlet of the Santa Ana River in Orange County, then traveled up the Inglewood Fault Line and turned that corner at Long Beach which put just too much stress on those 50+ year old brick and mortar buildings.
If we wanted to place blame on humans, it just may be the concreting in of that SA River right after the turn of the Previous Century. The constant dumping of silt into the sea -- rather than the Newport Harbor, could have had something to do with it.
Again, I'm a historian, not a geologist, so I look at things historically.
Illustration is from my book on the Costa Mesa Bluffs.
I'm fairly sure Obama called it in his first term; it was Bush's fault.
BeauHD twitter feed. "Trump is a saggy sack of shit. If any one of you is even remotely considering voting for him this November, please unfollow me. "
Fucks sakes he posted a News for Nerds the otherday from Slate, WTF?