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.

Comments

Bah!

[MightyMartian]

That's impossible. We all know fossil fuel extraction is totally harmless and that Christ himself protects people from such things.

Re:Bah!

[Black Parrot]

That's impossible. We all know fossil fuel extraction is totally harmless and that Christ himself protects people from such things.

Who needs Jesus to protect people when you have Congress to protect the fossil fuel industry?

Just more correlation

[LordLucless]

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.

Re:Just more correlation

[cheater512]

Also since a earthquake is a release of tectonic pressure, wouldn't it implicitly mean that triggering the release in pressure prematurely caused a less severe quake than what could have occurred if it wasn't artificially triggered?

Re:Just more correlation

[mysidia]

It's a possibility.... consider the possibility that they time-shifted a quake which was inevitable and might have happened 80 years later, in 2015 instead of 1933, and with 1000X as much strength in magnitude.

Re:Just more correlation

[hyades1]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drilling-for-earthquakes/

Re:Just more correlation

[Black Parrot]

Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint. -- Edward Tufte

Maybe the earthquakes caused the drilling.

Re:Just more correlation

[Rudisaurus]

I thought the same thing until I read TFA a second time. The authors mention oil production practices -- depletion without fluid replacement, which is rarely done anymore -- and they specifically cite an instance of an existing well located over the epicenter of the 1933 quake being deepened and surging in production 9 months prior to the actual quake. They go on to say that because production practices changed after 1935, no further correlation of quakes with drilling/production activity in the LA basin have been found. So there are mechanistic hints here: pressure depletion (evidenced by land subsidence) changing the energy balance in underlying strata.

I wonder if anyone has looked at the Middle East oil fields -- where primary production was common practice for much longer and wells are hugely prolific -- to see if there is a similar correlation with seismic activity there?

Re:Just more correlation

[drinkypoo]

Also since a earthquake is a release of tectonic pressure, wouldn't it implicitly mean that triggering the release in pressure prematurely caused a less severe quake than what could have occurred if it wasn't artificially triggered?

The pressure might have been released in several smaller seismic events over time if it wasn't done this way.

Re:Just more correlation

[Ol Olsoc]

It's a possibility.... consider the possibility that they time-shifted a quake which was inevitable and might have happened 80 years later, in 2015 instead of 1933, and with 1000X as much strength in magnitude.

It's also possible that it woke an inactive fault or moved it to a different area.

Placing or removing mass from underground is not unlikely to have any effect. Regardless the concept of making a small 5 something magnitude earthquake as a stress release mechanism is going to be a hard sell.

Re:Just more correlation

[number6x]

Good catch on the water injection connection. Water injection, or water flooding, was a process developed in the late 1800's in Pennsylvania, but it did not become mainstream until the late 1920's. The purpose is usually to get the well to produce more. Injection increases well pressure and more oil can be released from a given site.

As you noted, a side effect is that pressure in the underground chambers in maintained using water injection so the risk of massive earthquakes from chamber collapse is reduced.

However, crude oil is much more viscous than water is. underground reservoirs that will hold oil for millions of years won't hold water as well. That water will more likely drain from the areas that would hold the oil. Because the water is less viscous it can flow through permeable layers of rock that oil could not. There is good evidence that this causes many, much smaller tremors. Water injection probably prevents the big collapses that lead to big deadly quakes, but seem to trade it for many smaller quakes.

There are some theories that water injection 'lubricates' fault lines leading to quakes. I think the evidence based jury is still out on that one. This article points to evidence of a few large quakes in areas of heavy drilling in an era before water injection became common. The Oklahoma evidence shows many small quakes in an area where water injection was heavily used. These both theorize the same reason for the quakes, destabilization of structures after the removal of oil. One quickly and catastrophically, the other spread out over time as water flow regulated the rate of destabilization.

However, Southern California is an area of known tectonic activity. The quakes there could have been unrelated, or only partly related to drilling.Oklahoma is pretty stable. Residents of South Eastern Missouri, along the New Madrid fault line, experience plenty of small quakes. But Oklahomans used to worry more about tornadoes than earthquakes. If the Huntington Beach type earthquakes had happened in Oklahoma back in the 1920's, before water injection, I'd say this guy should get a Nobel Prize in Geology (if it were a thing).

Deadly 1933 Long Beach Earthquake May Have Been Ca

[rickyslashdot]

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.

Re:Oil

[ClickOnThis]

Removing the oil from the ground should minimize tectonic shifts when the lubricant goes missing?

Only when the cavity the oil occupied settles to take up the space the oil left behind. There's a word for that event.

Re:Oil drilling?

[chipschap]

You sure? I thought it was caused by the Russians...

No, sorry, it was caused by global warming. Only they didn't call it that back then because Al Gore hadn't discovered it yet :)

Triggered, not caused

[Solandri]

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.

Re:Triggered, not caused

[leehwtsohg]

The energy could be released through a thousand small quakes, or a big one. Just like you can "trigger" the release
of the energy stored in a balloon with a pin or by slowly releasing the stored air.
Or that throwing stones just triggered the release of energy stored in glass walls that would have been released anyway on the way to
equilibrium.

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Re:Oil

[dbIII]

Yes but you are applying one dimensional thinking.
Try filling a glass of water with sand and pebbles.
Next pour out the water.
Now try to find the cavity.
Not so large as initially expected is it?

Re:Deadly 1933 Long Beach Earthquake May Have Been

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Re:Silly semantic games

[khallow]

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.

That analogy would work, if the murderer does something relatively subtle that wouldn't normally kill a person, but takes advantage of a condition that would kill the person anyway. I don't know, maybe give a person with a serious heart condition a fright or put them in a situation where they have to exert themselves.