

The arrival of man-made earthquakes - igonvalue
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/weather-underground

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patcon
Doesn't the arrival of man-made earthquakes signify the departure of even
larger natural earthquakes? This would oddly strike me as possibly a valid use
of fracking technology -- forcing earthquakes before tension builds to
catastrophic levels.

(If so, I'd prefer we did this without pulling up more petroleum products.)

Disclaimer: I skimmed the article. Also, I'm against a future built on
petroleum and fracking in general.

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th0ma5
I would think most of these earthquakes are the vertical-movement variety,
whereas tectonic sliding horizontal movement earthquakes are the much larger
and dangerous kind, and may not be affected by any release of tension like
these man made ones may be creating.

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jkot
Dam can also cause earthquake.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_seismicity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_seismicity)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Sichuan_earthquake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Sichuan_earthquake)

~~~
azurezyq
Checked the original article:
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5912/322.full](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5912/322.full)
And I cannot see a clear conclusion, just wait for more data and see. More
updates for that recently?

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mutagen
There's an old USGS paper on the increased seismicity around Lake Mead after
Hoover Dam was built.

[http://usgsprojects.org/lee/Rogers_Lee_BSSA1976.pdf](http://usgsprojects.org/lee/Rogers_Lee_BSSA1976.pdf)

The Wikipedia page on induced seismicity has additional examples:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_seismicity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_seismicity)

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msane
So, can anyone cite any reasoning suggesting that we aren't going to trigger
the Yellowstone Supervolcano with fraking?

Just curious.

~~~
chc
I think it's similar to the reasoning for "We aren't going to trigger the
Yellowstone Supervolcano with the Tesla Model 3" and "We aren't going to
trigger the Yellowstone Supervolcano with new vegan egg replacements" — we
just don't have any good reason to believe it _will_ happen.

~~~
msane
That's not reasoning that's just being sarcastic. Increasing seismic
activity... Why not?

~~~
chc
Because "Why not?" is not a reason to believe something. Cars also cause the
ground to shake. So do sledgehammers. Not everything that sometimes causes the
ground to shake will cause the Yellowstone Caldera to erupt.

Fracking is associated with relatively small earthquakes. But relatively small
earthquakes happen in the area of Yellowstone all the time, so that doesn't
necessarily seem alarming.

The thing is, this isn't, as you requested, "reasoning suggesting that we
aren't going to trigger the Yellowstone Supervolcano with fraking". But it's
also not "just being sarcastic". What I'm pointing out is that we have no
logical reason to believe we _are_ going to make Yellowstone explode with
fracking. Until there is evidence that something will cause Yellowstone to
erupt, it's kind of weird to be asked to argue positively that it won't.

~~~
msane
You have a very different kind of logic it seems...

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blumkvist
WTF is with the abrupt money talk in the middle of the article? The author
just can't resist the urge to bash on the evil oil men? This really spoiled
the article for me.

~~~
anigbrowl
The references to money buying political influence are both brief and
relevant. I don't see how you could write a credible article on this topic
without observing the existence of powerful economic incentives.

(Edit: I originally wrote 'credible argument' which doesn't make much sense)

The oil business is interesting to economists because the real world market
comes quite close to the economic model of perfect competition; it's fast and
cheap to set up or shut down a well (relative to the value of the oil one may
extract), the commodity is standardized and fungible, there are enough
producers in the market that they exist as price-takers, and the price of oil
is widely known and tracked throughout the economy - far better then any other
single commodity. Why _wouldn 't_ you consider the economic factors in a story
like this?

~~~
mc32
Well, the article could be simply about the physics of geology or it could add
some context.

One important thing about this is indemnification. Since these quakes are
induced by industry and some quakes cause superficial (on the earth's surface)
damage, the question of who pays for damage to structures arises. Whose
drilling caused it? Since it probably can't accurately be pinpointed, it's
more likely there be some kind of industrywide insurance scheme which would
cover these incidents.

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jandrewrogers
Oklahoma is a seismically active region that has _always_ had a lot of
earthquakes in the magnitude 5 range. USGS even has dedicated seismic hazard
maps for Oklahoma. This has been going on long before anyone was fracking in
Oklahoma.

Most Americans are unaware that Oklahoma is an active seismic zone and
articles like this prey on that ignorance by implying that these earthquakes
arrived with fracking. There is a lot of fracking in places do not naturally
have a lot of earthquakes but the fact that they always pick Oklahoma suggests
that they are trying to construct a false correlation.

A lot of fracking occurs in California too but most people understand that
earthquakes in California are going to happen whether you frack or not. Same
with Oklahoma.

~~~
dmckeon
One of the key differences between Oklahoma & California earthquakes is the
relative depth of quakes of significant magnitude.

Quakes caused by tectonic plate interaction and those possibly caused by fluid
injection may not be usefully comparable - but ask a seismologist, or at least
a geologist, not a journalist, or a random internet commenter.

There's a nice interactive quake map at:

[http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map](http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map)

edit: Pasting a long (512+ chars) URL did not work well, but use the settings
sprocket and the checkboxes for US Faults & Hazards.

BTW, the hot spot in the Missouri/Arkansas area is the "New Madrid" fault,
locally pronounced with the stress on the first syllable: "Mad-rid" not "Mu-
drid". It makes emergency preparedness folks nervous because it had a big
quake in the early 1800s, very little since, and now has lot of brick
construction - sigh.

~~~
macintux
Describing the New Madrid quake as "big" is a bit of an understatement. Closer
to "The Day the Earth Stood Still" in terms of impact.

