Image: Earthquake damage - Bridge Street., a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 23934380@N06's photostream
Human activities can cause earthquakes. It sounds a little crazy to say, but it’s something we’ve known about for a while. For instance, seismologists say that a 6.3 magnitude quake that struck India’s Maharashtra state in 1967 was directly caused by the 1963 construction of a major dam and reservoir project in that region.
Basically, fault lines exist. When we start messing with them – applying very heavy weights, taking very heavy weights away, or lubricating the fault line with various liquids – we can trigger movement. Usually, these are not large earthquakes. But they can be felt. And they are something we want to avoid.
Now, a study done by the Ohio State Department of Natural Resources has concluded that a series of small quakes in that state were directly caused by improper disposal of wastewater from a natural gas fracking operation.
Fracking, as a reminder, is a process of freeing up trapped natural gas by injecting liquid into the Earth. The force of the water cracks rocks so the gas can flow through. This is not the part of the process that’s been implicated in the Ohio earthquakes, however. Instead, it’s about what happens to that liquid once the fracking is done.
Fracking liquid is called “brine” and it’s often referred to as being water, but it’s actually water mixed with a lot of other stuff, some of it toxic. Waste water treatment plants aren’t set up to deal with this kind of contamination, so the standard way of disposing of this liquid is to pump it into the ground. In Ohio, regulators say, the site chosen for waste water disposal wasn’t vetted carefully enough. Instead of being geologically inert, it turned out to be the site of a fault line. The liquid lubricated the fault line and helped it move. The result: Earthquakes.
Now, according to the Associated Press, fracking operations disposing of wastewater in Ohio are going to have to follow much more stringent rules and provide a lot more geologic data to the regulators before they’ll be allowed to pump any more liquid into the ground. The report states that this process can be done safely. It just wasn't being done that way.
================================================
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
What happened to Caitlin Flanagan? The once-feisty contrarian who urged wives to nag less and put out more has turned painfully tame... more
================================================
The E-Reader of 1935 via Stephen’s Lighthouse
Read more from the Atlantic
================================================
Winston’s Hiccup via 3quarksdaily by Morgan Meis
“I think I’ll write a book today,” the writer Georges Simenon was said to tell his wife at breakfast. “Fine,” she would reply, “but what will you do in the afternoon?”
Winston Churchill was similarly prolific, and not just in the field of letters.
continued at The Opinionater here (by Frank Jacobs).
Fascinating anecdotes about history.
================================================
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
More Persian and Indian than Arab, The Arabian Nights is the stuff of Occidental fantasy. What explains Scheherazade’s enduring allure?... more
================================================
The (horribly awesome) things that live on Ball’s Pyramid via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Ball’s Pyramid looks like a place where nothing could survive. The remnants of a long-dead volcano, it sits alone in the South Pacific ... a narrow, rocky half-moon some 1,800 feet high.
But Ball's Pyramid isn't devoid of life ...
for years this place had a secret. At 225 feet above sea level, hanging on the rock surface, there is a small, spindly little bush, and under that bush, a few years ago, two climbers, working in the dark, found something totally improbable hiding in the soil below. How it got there, we still don't know.================================================
What they found is horribly awesome and awesomely horrible and you need to read the whole story, written by NPR’s Robert Krulwich.
John White
Via Elizabeth Preston. If you want a hint, she described this as, “a really beautiful story about some really disgusting giant insects”.
================================================
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
On the internet, expertise is pooled, intelligence is collective, and discovery is being reinvented. Welcome to the era of open-source science... more
================================================
Is Emotion Smarter than Rationality? via Big Think by Orion Jones
The uncanny processing power of the subconscious has been brought into further light. A survey conducted at Columbia Business School, which asked people to make predictions about events ranging from a political election to American Idol results, found that emotional reactions proved more prophetic than steelier evaluations.
Read More
================================================
How Exercise Benefits Your Brain via Big Think by Orion Jones
Japanese scientists have just uncovered why exercising gives your brain such a powerful pick up. By examining the brains of animals on an exercise regimen, they saw that physical activity severely drains the energy resources that neurons need to fire, which doing so provide for functions like thought and memory.
Read More
================================================
No comments:
Post a Comment