- Hot
- New
- Categories...
- Producer's Lounge
- Producer's Vault
- The Gulch: Live! (New)
- Ask the Gulch!
- Going Galt
- Books
- Business
- Classifieds
- Culture
- Economics
- Education
- Entertainment
- Government
- History
- Humor
- Legislation
- Movies
- News
- Philosophy
- Pics
- Politics
- Science
- Technology
- Video
- The Gulch: Best of
- The Gulch: Bugs
- The Gulch: Feature Requests
- The Gulch: Featured Producers
- The Gulch: General
- The Gulch: Introductions
- The Gulch: Local
- The Gulch: Promotions
- Marketplace
- Members
- Store
- More...
El nino and La nina cause waters to be higher, lower and/or static in different parts of the world at the same time, even though the waters are commingled, but those are weather related. On another note, fracking does cause mini earthquakes as well. Injection or ejection of fluids into any area below the earth's surface will have ramifications of some sort. The point I was trying to make submitting this article was general causality. If you are going to take, something is going to give and vice versa. The scale of the results is the concern I have.
Understood, as do tides, but normalized sea levels can only be changed by addition of more water or reducing the volume of the vessel, both of which happen constantly. Plate tectonics aren't an historical anomaly.
I have to date seen no evidence fracking causes earthquakes. If you can define a mini earthquake I might agree. If your sensitivity is fine enough a heavy truck causes earthquakes.
I heartily agree adding and removing fluids from underground reservoirs changes things. I've been preaching it for years, ever since Ekofisk. What you should understand about fracking is the substance being injected, along with water is sand, yes, almost like beach sand, but finer and highly sorted. The water flows back to the surface, but the sand stays in place, in the tiny fractures created by the water. We call it a propant. Once it's in place it becomes part of the formation. Fracking is banned in California, but has been widely practiced elsewhere around the world for over 60 years. Yes, around 60% of all the wells we've drilled have been fracked for decades, each one created its own small earthquake, that ended exactly when we quit pumping.
Man made subsidence is an issue people ignore because correcting it would mean an end to accessing those aquifers until they're replenished. No one's willing to go without water.
The bit about valley subsidence is absolutely true, measurable, and has been measured. However, pumping water from aquifers doesn't "raise mountains", unless you mean in relation to the valleys, which it lowers.
This is one of, if not the entire reason for some coastal subsidence. We're pumping vast amounts of water out of subterranean aquifers, causing reductions in surface elevations. In these cases it appears the sea level is rising, but the seas are commingled, you can't have the waters of the western Gulf of Mexico rising at the same time the waters of the Caribbean are static.
While it's not impossible that water extraction could affect earthquakes, it could only affect very shallow quakes. Most quakes originate a depths far below the fresh water base. In most areas of the country anything below 1000' will be saltwater. (A reporter from the upper Midwest, newly hired by an Oklahoma newspaper, published an article blaming a string of earthquakes on a recently licensed salt water injection well, only later to find out the injection well was 5,000' deep and was reinjecting into a previously depleted zone, and the quakes had originated 4 miles underground.)