Mother Jones: Major earthquakes thousands of miles away can trigger reflex quakes in areas where fluids have been injected into the ground from fracking and other industrial operations, according to a study published in the journal Science on Thursday.
Some research I've been doing on and off for about a year which I have concluded in this sort of documentary form. First post here (Update 12/25/2013 - Blog requires payment to stay up & I'm considering it - The following is a video I made that got cut off accidentally, but I covered all the points I wanted to make so I left it as it is).
Video documentary. Covers fracking and tsunamis as well.
Do your own search on earthquakes here: http://
The following search was done from the link above:
Observation: Before the Tsunami quake there was another couple of large earthquakes. {Update 12/15/2013 - All the quakes seem to constellation around the same tectonic plate area AND THEN spread to other areas of the globe through, what I call "Sympathy earthquakes" following the logic in the words "mother earth". Thus a simple earthquake cause by fracking can spread around the globe and cause major consequences. The science of earthquakes is till in its baby stages or simple at a standstill so my research ended here}.
Links On Fracking...
Fracking DID cause ELEVEN earthquakes in Ohio last year
Ohio Earthquake Likely Caused by Fracking Wastewater
Maps: The Secrets Drillers Can Hide About the Fracking in Your Backyard
Fracking DID cause ELEVEN earthquakes in Ohio last year
Ohio Earthquake Likely Caused by Fracking Wastewater
Maps: The Secrets Drillers Can Hide About the Fracking in Your Backyard
Notes:
The melting Arctic icecap is just an isolated incident that's occurred every summer since 2003, so there's no reason to panic. (04:00)
Notice that the following study is from a Petroleum Journal from a Scientist who hasn't been vetted.
Given the nature of the climate debate, how the media in the us works, how studies can be bought... not citing a scientists funding in any mainstream outlet is an incomplete report.
The Study from The BBC:
From The BBC: UK scientists confirm that 3 earthquakes occurred due to fracking ... and that is just a small fraction of man-made earthquakes. (There at 2.0 - 5.0 earthquakes pretty much all the time based on my observations on twitter news feeds.... I'm willing to concede here that these may not be due to fracking):
In recent years, hydraulic fracturing has become a significant means of recovering oil and gas that is too tightly bound into rock formations to be recovered by normal drilling.
Fracking, as it is called, utilises a mixture of water, sand and chemicals pumped underground at high pressure to crack open sedimentary rocks and release the fuels within.
Earth moversBut opponents of fracking have long been concerned that the process could induce earthquakes such as the one that occurred near a shale gas operation in Lancashire in 2011.
Now researchers from Durham University's Energy Institute say that the pumping of fracking liquid does indeed have the potential to reactivate dormant fault lines. But they say that compared to many other human activities such as mining or filling reservoirs with water, fracking is not a significant source of tremors that can be felt on the surface.
"We've looked at 198 published examples of induced seismicity since 1929," Prof Richard Davies from Durham told BBC News.
"Hydraulic fracturing is not really in the premier league for causing felt seismicity. Fundamentally it is is never going to be as important as mining or filling dams which involve far greater volumes of fluid."
The researchers detailed just three incidences of earthquakes created by fracking - one each in the US, the UK and Canada. The biggest atHorn River Basin in Canada in 2011 had a magnitude of 3.8.
"Most fracking related events release a negligible amount of energy roughly equivalent to, or even less than someone jumping off a ladder onto the floor," said Prof Davies.
What has been shown to cause bigger seismic activity is the underground injection of oil-drilling waste water. Recent research in the US has linked this to a 5.7 magnitude earthquake in Oklahoma in 2011. This isn't an issue in the UK as the practice of injecting waste water underground is banned by EU legislation.
If oil and gas exploration companies want to reduce the risk from fracking completely, the key thing according to Prof Davies is not to drill too close to tectonic faults.
Note - 12/25/2013: Given the nature of faults lines and our lack of any data of the WHOLE planet - drilling ANYWHERE can lead to earthquakes. The earth simply seems to be filled with faultlines and not JUST the major ones we read about in school
More on Natural Disaster Management: http://
Notes:
1. A recent article...
Scientists have sold their souls – and basic research – to business
A devil's bargain struck by scientists with government has led to the downgrading of basic research
The view of science as the handmaiden of business threatens to discourage a generation of bright, creative people from pursuing science at all. After all, what is attractive about a poorly remunerated, uncertain life in science without the freedom to work on problems of your own choosing? The allure of Britain's overblown financial sector is likely to prove too great.
Meanwhile, the research councils continue to demand impact statementswith their grant applications, a requirement that can only reward the most mundane research or those scientists most able to dissemble or exaggerate. One research council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, has largely stopped funding PhDs that are not associated with one of its Centres for Doctoral Training. The purpose of those centres? To "forge lasting links with industry".
I suspect that the letter sent to Times Higher Education on 5 January demanding root and branch reform of the EPSRC will be the first of many to hit the desks, then the wastepaper baskets, in Swindon this year.
Can basic research be saved from the tyranny of the profit motive? I doubt it. The coalition government has shown little inclination to question the science policies inherited from New Labour, and judging by the science minister's comments, he has little time for science for science's sake. The devil, it seems, will always get his due.
2. An ancient book...
The Republican War on Science
By Chris Mooney
Science has never been more crucial to deciding the political issues facing the country. Yet science and scientists have less influence with the federal government than at any time since the Eisenhower administration. In the White House and Congress today, findings are reported in a politicized manner; spun or distorted to fit the speaker's agenda; or, when they're too inconvenient, ignored entirely. On a broad array of issues-stem cell research, climate change, missile defense, abstinence education, product safety, environmental regulation, and many others-the Bush administration's positions fly in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. Federal science agencies, once fiercely independent under both Republican and Democratic presidents, are increasingly staffed by political appointees and fringe theorists who know industry lobbyists and evangelical activists far better than they know the science. This is not unique to the Bush administration, but it is largely a Republican phenomenon, born of a conservative dislike of environmental, health, and safety regulation, and at the extremes, of evolution and legalized abortion. In The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney ties together the disparate strands of the attack on science into a compelling and frightening account of our government's increasing unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate research and ideologically driven pseudoscience.
3. Neil Tyson's explanation...
America's science decline
Neil deGrasse Tyson uses a few maps to describe America's diminishing contributions to the world's scientific research: This short video captures part of a public presentation by Neil deGrasse Tyson about how the amount of peer-reviewed scientific research done in the U.S. has decreased since 2000, and increased in other places like Japan, China, and Europe. Very concerning (for America, anyway):
Given the nature of the climate debate, how the media in the us works and how studies can be bought... not citing a scientists funding in any mainstream outlet is an incomplete report.
Important:
An ancient NAA public domain documentary:
Notice, in particular, the NUMBER of fault lines the NASA satellite discovered under a small area. Do we have public scans of the whole earths crust? We should.
Related?
Victims think drilling triggered shaking, and that's OK...
PRAGUE, Okla. -- Jerri Loveland sees a connection between the oil drilling that surrounds her home and the earthquake last November that upended her life.
The magnitude-5.6 convulsion toppled her chimney and buckled her tornado cellar. It inflicted about $50,000 in damage to the farmhouse she shares with her husband, John, and their two young children on a gravel road about 45 minutes east of Oklahoma City.
They had no earthquake insurance, so they don't have the money for repairs. But if they don't fix the damage by September, they fear they'll lose their homeowners insurance.
"I'm not sure what we're going to do. Hope for the lottery, maybe," she said as she showed a visitor how a decades-old addition split from the house.
Some of her neighbors in this rural patch dotted with cattle and oil wells blame "fracking," or hydraulic fracturing. But coming from an oil industry family, she sees the connection as having more to do with the millions of gallons of salt-laden water that comes up with the oil and gets reinjected in deep wells nearby.
In rare cases, that wastewater can lubricate faults and unleash earthquakes. Loveland didn't know before the earthquake that her house sits nearly on top of the Wilzetta Fault, the one that ruptured in November.
"I don't think it was the fracking. I think it was the injection wells," she said, pointing over trees toward an injection well about half a mile away. "But what do you do?"
What people have done in other states -- Arkansas, Ohio and Texas -- is file class-action lawsuits, push for stricter seismic rules and shut down injection wells.
But not in Oklahoma. State officials here are taking a slower approach than their counterparts in Ohio and Arkansas and continuing to let the companies inject near the active fault. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which oversees drilling, is working with the Oklahoma Geological Survey to determine whether the quake was triggered, or "induced."
"We're continuing to look at it. It's a little different than what's happened in these other states," said Corporation Commissioner Dana Murphy, who leads the panel. "There's been injection activity in this area for a long time. And there's naturally occurring earthquakes here.
The oil companies that operate the nearby wells say they couldn't have triggered the quake. But scientists say injection certainly can unleash earthquakes. University of Oklahoma seismologist Katie Keranen, who has been studying the earthquake since the day it happened, says there's evidence to back up Loveland's hunch.
"There's a compelling link between the zone of injection and seismicity," Keranen said at a seismological conference in April. She's one of a handful of scientists who see evidence of such a connection.
Like Loveland, people who see potential connections between the quake and drilling activities are resigned rather than resentful. Most seem ready to wait while the state gathers information.
"I assume many people in town think it's the injection. I don't doubt they caused it," said Jim Greff, city manager in Prague, the city closest to the quake's center. "Until the Corporation Commission steps up or someone at the [state] Geological Survey steps up, I don't know that anything can be done."
'Shaking, shaking, shaking' It was just a few minutes before 11 on a Saturday night when the earthquake struck. John and Jerri Loveland had just finished watching Oklahoma State University beat Kansas State in football.
"They had won and everything was going on and the house started shaking," Loveland recalled. She ran upstairs to get their daughter, a toddler. John got their son, and they ran out the door.
After a solid minute of shaking, they stepped back inside and heard a hissing sound. Their pipes were broken. They turned off their water well, got in their car and drove 70 miles to stay with relatives.
About 2 miles away, Joe Reneau said it sounded as if a plane crashed into his yard. The convulsions crumpled, split and tilted the solid concrete slab his home was built on. It would take 33 steel piers driven into bedrock to right it.
"It was just shaking, shaking, shaking," Reneau recalled.
Then the top half of his chimney crashed through the roof of his den.
Farther south, toward Meeker, the quake buckled the blacktop of U.S. Route 62. To the west, in Shawnee, a turret atop the stately administration building at St. Gregory's University severed and crashed to the ground.
The upheaval cracked walls for miles around, knocked over dressers, bounced plates off shelves and broke open cracks in the flat, red earth. At least two people were injured by falling bricks, and state officials tallied up damage to nearly 200 homes and businesses.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency declined to provide disaster aid, but the U.S. Small Business Administration issued about $2 million in low-interest loans in the area.
Aftershocks continued for weeks after, as strong as magnitude 4. Six months later, in early May, a magnitude-3.9 quake struck the same area.
As frightening as it was, Loveland thinks the "foreshock" was scarier. In the early morning of that Saturday, at about 2 a.m., she and her husband were roused from their sleep by a magnitude-4.7 convulsion, sending them scrambling outside with their children.
"We didn't know what was going on," she recalled.
That foreshock was centered a little less than a mile from a drilling site with two injection wells owned by Spess Oil Co., a small operator from Cleveland, Okla., about 70 miles north of Prague. One theory holds that the foreshock triggered the "main shock," which was felt as far away as St. Louis. It was the strongest earthquake ever recorded in Oklahoma.
'Too much of a coincidence' It would not be the biggest U.S. earthquake suspected of being triggered by oil and gas activities. According to a recent National Research Council report, that would be a magnitude-6.5 earthquake in 1983 near Coalinga, Calif., that injured 94 people. Researchers have linked it to oil extraction.
But at magnitude 5.6, the Oklahoma quake would be the largest caused by wastewater injection.
And Joe and Mary Reneau think it was. Joe said that if the earthquake and its aftershocks are plotted, they line up with the injection wells in the area.
"That's too much of a coincidence," said Mary, seated next to Joe in their living room on a June afternoon. "I definitely believe that. Just about everybody around here thinks it is."
Smaller earthquakes tied to oil and gas activities in the past few years have triggered bigger reactions in other states.
In Texas, Chesapeake Energy Corp. shut down two wells near the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport in 2009 after they were linked to much smaller, magnitude-3.3 quakes (Greenwire, March 11, 2010).
Ohio this year called in a team of seismologists from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory to study a series of earthquakes in Youngstown that culminated in a magnitude-4 event on New Year's Day. Three months later, state officials announced that the quake had likely been caused by a new injection well, which had already been shut down (Greenwire, March 9). They also proposed rules banning new injection wells near faults. Earlier this month, Gov. John Kasich (R) deemed the situation an emergency and told regulators to implement them immediately (EnergyWire, July 12).
In north-central Arkansas, several residents are pursuing a class-action lawsuit against the operators of four wells linked to a "swarm" of earthquakes as large as magnitude 4.7 (EnergyWire, July 5). State officials say the shaking diminished after regulators shut down all injection last year.
In those states, however, large-scale oil and gas drilling is newer than in Oklahoma and not woven so tightly into the economy.
Oklahoma squeezes a Texas-sized love for the oil and gas industry into a state four times smaller. The signs are hard to miss. The grounds of the state Capitol in Oklahoma City are dotted with oil rigs. The University of Oklahoma's geology school bears the ConocoPhillips brand. Oklahoma City's skyline is dominated by the new Devon Energy Center tower, and its beloved basketball team plays in Chesapeake Energy Arena.
"Oklahoma relies on this resource," said Oklahoma Geological Survey seismologist Austin Holland. Prague's Greff echoed, "Oil and gas is big in Oklahoma."
Oil and gas is big, as well, in Prague, the city closest to the quake's epicenter. The biggest employer in town is New Dominion LLC, a Tulsa company that pioneered large-scale "dewatering" -- a production method requiring a lot of wastewater disposal -- in Oklahoma.
Two of the five members on the city council were New Dominion employees until one resigned earlier this year. The company bought water rights for the city and land for a fire station. And the company's annual "New Dominion Dayz" bash is the second-biggest event in Prague each year, after its Kolache Festival.
New Dominion has been generous with the state Geological Survey, as well, donating $100,000 worth of seismic equipment to measure a swarm of earthquakes in Oklahoma City's eastern suburbs.
Given the industry's involvement with the city, Greff shows little surprise when he's asked whether Prague is showing undue deference to drillers.
"It's not true of me," Greff said in an interview in his office. "If they want to give us things without asking for anything in return, I'll take it."
The industry's popularity is one of the reasons that Joe Reneau sees no point in taking on the oil companies. "I'd be run out of town," he explained. But Reneau, who retired back to Oklahoma 25 years ago after working in military intelligence in Washington, D.C., said he's ready to challenge the oil companies in court -- next time.
"If it were to happen again, I would be soliciting donations for a lawsuit to put this thing in the court system to get a definitive answer: Are they or are they not related to fracking and the saltwater wells?" he said. "So long as there's not a court action, I don't think anybody's going to do anything. Everything's going to be swept under the rug."
'They're kind of a savior' Jean Antonides' voice has taken on a rare mocking tone.
"This is it. This is King Kong," he says. The vice president of exploration for New Dominion is standing next to his pickup truck on a gravel pad and pointing to a 6-foot metal tower of valves.
"This" is the Wilzetta saltwater disposal well, which happens to bear the name of the fault that ruptured in November. It's one of three such wells within two and a half miles of the quake's epicenter. It could fit inside most suburban backyard sheds.
Black plastic pipes stick out of either side, like outstretched arms reaching into the red dirt. Water is coursing into the pipes from the oil wells that surround it in the green and brown fields beyond. From there, it's flowing down more than 4,000 feet into a formation called the Arbuckle.
To Antonides, who usually speaks in a more earnest tone, it's silly to think that his company's well caused the quake.
"That's people watching too many Superman movies," Antonides says. "Some individuals pick only the data that serves their purpose."
He adds that having earthquakes may not be such a bad thing. Smaller earthquakes such as the one in November might be preventing bigger, more dangerous earthquakes by relieving stress on underground faults.
"What happens if there had not been that release of energy?" he asks. "They're kind of a savior. They help keep down the big ones."
Such sentiments are not generally shared by the seismological community. Some say smaller, man-made quakes have usually presaged larger eruptions. Others have looked into setting off controlled earthquakes. But they found that although they could start them, they weren't sure whether they could stop them and almost certainly couldn't control them. In addition, a magnitude-5 quake releases only about one-thousandth of the energy of a magnitude-7 quake.
Antonides thinks the November earthquake was caused by the weight of extremely heavy rains in the area that fell days before the earthquake after months of drought.
"The volume is just immense. It's the rate of change," he says. "That was the trigger point for the Wilzetta fault. That relative weight change was the trigger point."
The 3,000 or so barrels (126,000 gallons) a day that New Dominion poured into the Wilzetta well in the month before the quake is tiny in comparison with that, he says. And he says it's significant that New Dominion doesn't need to use pressure to push water down the Wilzetta well. Instead, the water flows freely and even creates a vacuum in the well.
That's not true of the Spess wells. About 2 miles away, down gravel roads and a rutted two-track, they're only about a thousand yards apart as the crow flies. They inject much less water than the New Dominion well, but it has taken increasing amounts of pressure to get the water down. In 2000, Spess used no pressure. But after that, it started taking more pressure to inject the brine, as high as 500 psi in 2010. In the company's 2011 report to the state, filed in March of this year, the pressure was down to 250 psi.
The Spess wells are even less imposing than the New Dominion well. They were drilled as production wells in the 1940s and '50s, and they show their age. They both have a patina of rust, and broken fencing at one of the wells surrounded standing liquid on a recent afternoon in June. Piles of rusting well parts are strewn nearby.
Steven Spess, listed on state forms as the agent for the company, said in a brief phone interview with EnergyWire that there's no chance the company's wells had anything to do with the earthquake.
"None whatsoever," he said. "We put in such a small amount of water."
But some of Keranen's fellow seismologists agree that there is evidence to support the idea that the earthquake is connected to the injection wells.
University of Memphis seismologist Steve Horton, whose findings were part of the basis for the well shutdown in Arkansas last year, posted a research report earlier this year citing a correlation among the Spess wells, the New Dominion well and the location of the quakes' epicenters (EnergyWire, April 19). He warned that Oklahoma authorities are risking another damaging earthquake if they continue to allow injection into the fault.
But what brought national attention to the question of whether the Nov. 5 quake was man-made was a March U.S. Geological Survey report that said a "remarkable" increase in earthquakes is "almost certainly man-made" (EnergyWire, March 19).
That finding did not include the November earthquake, but the author of the USGS report, seismologist Bill Ellsworth, told EnergyWire in April that "the largest preponderance of evidence" points to the Oklahoma quake, in addition to a Colorado quake earlier in 2011, being caused by injection (EnergyWire, April 23).
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