Scientists Link Deep Wells To Deadly Spanish Quake 118
Meshach writes "Research has suggested that human activity triggered an earthquake in Spain that killed nine and injured over three hundred. Drilling deeper and deeper wells to water crops over the past 50 years were identified as the culprit by scientist who examined satellite images of the area. It was noted that even without the strain caused by water extraction, a quake would likely have occurred at some point in the area but the extra stress of pumping vast amounts of water from a nearby aquifer may have been enough to trigger a quake at that particular time and place."
Span? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Span? (Score:5, Funny)
It's too complicated for me to understand ... (Score:5, Insightful)
From TPA:
Research has suggested that human activity triggered an earthquake
Umm ...
It was noted that even without the strain caused by water extraction, a quake would likely have occurred at some point in the area
Please pardon me, perhaps I am being too dense to understand the following intricacies:
How can it be that "Human activity triggered an earthquake" when a quake "would likely have occurred at some point in the area" ?
Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... (Score:5, Interesting)
How can it be that "Human activity triggered an earthquake" when a quake "would likely have occurred at some point in the area" ?
Imagine I pull out a gun and shoot you. Well, you would have died eventually anyway, right?
Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... (Score:5, Interesting)
the interesting question is if triggering it sooner made it less severe or more severe.
Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is also a question of location. Drilling for water in populated area may have shifted epicenter of the quake closer to the population center in question.
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That's a great question too!
Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Legally the only question is if this makes the people doing the drilling responsible for the damage caused by the earthquake. In previous cases involving things like erosion the answer has generally been "yes", even if the damage was inevitable.
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Certainly this is true of quake damage here in the USA, at least in California [andersonsprings.org].
That's just dumb (Score:2)
That's stupid. What if a kid bumps his bike into a bridge pylon by accident* and because of lack of servicing by the government this is enough to make the bridge collapse ? Is the kid('s parent) responsible for the bridge collapse ?
If you walk into a room and a house of cards collapses can you be charged for hours or days of lost labour ?
Or is this just because it's an oil company and it comes down to "blaming the unpopular" ?
* because I don't think anyone is seriously arguing these people intentionally cau
Italy's l'Aquila EQ: sentenced 6-years jail today (Score:2)
FWIW, this very evening an italian court condemned six scientists that had concluded 'no risk' in a meeting in the italian town l'Aquila just the day before an earthquake there killed 300 and wounded 1000's.
Bad luck maybe, but jailed for six years.
This M. Jean-Philippe Avouac is a good whistleblower...
and now here on /. ;-) (Score:2)
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/10/22/1634219/scientists-who-failed-to-warn-of-quake-found-guilty-of-manslaughter [slashdot.org]
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Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Eh, I'd prefer to use the analogy of pushing a boulder down a hill at his house, rather than waiting for erosion to do it a few years later. With a gun, you're changing how it happens and introducing all sorts of other complications. Even better, if we want to remove intent from the equation, maybe my house was next to the boulder and I left a hose running, which washed away the dirt under the boulder, leading to its cascading down the hillside into his house. While naturally-occurring erosion would've done the same job eventually, I just helped it along with some human-caused erosion.
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While naturally-occurring erosion would've done the same job eventually, I just helped it along with some human-caused erosion.
Or maybe you didn't and the boulder fell when it would have fallen anyway. Correlation isn't causation and all that.
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Earthquakes are technological, not natural, disasters anyway. People die because buildings and bridges collapse.
The worst quake in the continental US was in Tennesee, not California. Those cities don't have much in the way of earthquake codes.
Gonna make for some riviting TV one of these decades. :(
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... (Score:4, Informative)
Most quake prone areas have a frequency in single digit years, not hundreds of years.
Hell the bad areas can have quakes on a monthly or weekly basis.
Humans don't cause quakes, we can only trigger them.
The stress was there with or without the pumping, and that stress must be relieved.
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But you were throwing out that humans moved it up a few hundred years.
An equally stupid statement.
You were not stupid for the last thing the GP said.
Grats. You are only stupid for trying to spin things to make man "evil".
I say sue the guys drilling for water. Let the fucking pesants walk to fill their buckets at the river.
That will teach them.
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By "they" I take it you mean someone other than the poster I was replying to?
Because the posters use of "Hundreds of Years" in her previous post is in fact a spin. Based on no facts and pointed in the direction that poster agrees with.
have a nice day.
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Right.
Where did you get "Hundreds of Years"?
First, Spain has it share of earthquakes.
In May of 2011 of course they had one that killed 9 people.
In 1956 they had one that killed 12.
They have them much more frequently than every few hundred years.
So with no fact to support your statement and facts going against it why would you assume such a long period if not to put more weight on "Bad People"?
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This isn't really a quake prone area (that's to say, prone to quakes of any significant strength). You can tell by the age of the buildings - don't forget that this city is hundreds of years older than the United States, and many of its buildings (that are NOT built in earthquake-proof manners) have stood for centuries. The castle, built over 1200 years ago, suffered structural damage to its ancient walls. So it's entirely possible that the quake was triggered hundreds of years early. It's also possible tha
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Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: Humans cause it to happen *earlier* then it would have occurred naturally. They acted as the last triggering point rather then the natural stress buildup.
Adding stress when stress is already slowly building up is the same as this example.
A cup put underneath a running faucet. You adding extra water into the cup causing it to spill. That means that you caused it to spill, even if we know the cup would spill anyways due to the running faucet.
As for if this was a bad thing or not, who knows. It's possible that the extra stress could have cause the earthquake to be weaker then it would have been if it just slowly buildup to even higher levels. It could have also make the quake stronger compared to say if it naturally just caused several quakes instead of 1 giant one. Since it didn't occur naturally, it's all what ifs at this point.
Re:It's too complicated for me to understand ... (Score:5, Informative)
In this one they removed large quantities of water from the aquifer. While technically no energy was added to the system, the water's removal lowered the potential energy floor, essentially adding the potential energy of the now-too-high ground to any stress energy which had already been built up (if any).
An analogue to this case would be sinkholes caused by extracting or receding water from underground aquifers/caves. The removal of the water itself directly causes the sinkhole, or in this case the quake. Depending on the quantity of water removed (and thus the distance the ground above had to "settle"), there might not even have been any natural fault slippage involved, and this quake could have been entirely manmade.
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In English the word "triggered" is not related to cause. Humans merely finished tipping a wobbling domino.
Attention All Humans! (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop! Drop whatever it is you are fucking doing RIGHT NOW because whatever it is, some scientists you are going to fuck some other shit up.
Just freeze and don't move, or we're all going to fucking DIE!
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Please pardon me, perhaps I am being too dense to understand the following intricacies:
How can it be that "Human activity triggered an earthquake" when a quake "would likely have occurred at some point in the area" ?
It's the Global Warming standard. If Human Activity can cause something, it is beyond any doubt or hesitation Human Activity that's at fault. It doesn't matter if other causes are more likely, nor that similar Human Activity has been done for decades elsewhere with no ill effects. Oh, and Occams Razor be damned.
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Imagine a bucket hanging from a string that will snap once the bucket is full. You hang it from a branch, so that it will be filled by rain water.
Then, before it is full, you cut the string using a scissor.
This is perfectly analogous to what happened in Spain.
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How can it be that "Human activity triggered an earthquake" when a quake "would likely have occurred at some point in the area" ?
Would a car example help?
Say you fill up your tank, and a full tank will get you roughly 150 miles of driving.
It is a fact that your car will run out of fuel after roughly 150 miles of driving.
If I come along and siphon out most of your fuel, say to put into my car, then you will run out of fuel after driving only a few miles instead.
On the one hand, you are claiming it is OK that I stole your fuel, since you would have run out of fuel without my "help" anyways.
The rest of us are claiming I can not use that
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I hope this helps you underst
Re:Span? (Score:5, Funny)
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Just three levels deep? What an optimist.
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I could say preceded by Spic but that would be a derogatory term for someone of Spanish origin.
Re:Span? (Score:5, Funny)
It's where the ran falls manly on the plan.
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And where I'm testing my earthquake machne.
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Poor Professor Higgins!
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Where the hell is Span?
It is country named by scientist. In fact, scientist was the same as culprit.
Re:Span? (Score:5, Funny)
Where the hell is Span?
Google says it's between a rock (Gibraltar) and a hard place to publish Web search results (France [slashdot.org]).
Re:Span? (Score:4, Funny)
It's located somewhere in Div
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Where the hell is Span?
A province in the country of Spic, duh. Never heard of Spic & Span?
Re:No, I haven't. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've heard of Spic in Span though. Is that where you're thinking of?
No, Spic and Span [wikipedia.org] is what I meant.
Although it appears that it's seen on the official web site's [spicnspan.com] title as Spic 'n Span, but that's missing an apostrophe. The product appears to say Spic and Span.
Like how people abbreviate "until" to "till" instead of "'til" - missing the apostrophe and adding a letter L, making it a different word (till as in cash till, or verb: to till the land, etc.)
Or, better example, Rock 'n Roll.
Interesting tidbit from World Wide Words [worldwidewords.org], via Wikipedia:
Re:Span? (Score:5, Funny)
Where the hell is Span?
Relevant citation:
The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm
Austerity (Score:2)
Budget cuts, you know. Because the MF, the pean Central Bank and the Word Ban won't give you any more lans unless you turn over a letter or two. Maybe they can buy a vowl from Vanna and Pat. OK, that's all 've got...
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It sank into the ocean due to the quake!
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It is usually in HTML where you have some formatting that break the normal flow of the page. While deprecated by the DIV tag for most usage. it is still there. For the most part it is fairly useless, However if you add CSS to it. you can do additional formatting with it.
#iLost (Score:2)
Apple maps strike again!
In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Research has suggest that in most cases, murder is directly related to getting out of bed.
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So let's give people six-shooter alarm clocks. If it's a foregone conclusion, what's the harm in expediting the process?
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Research has suggest that in most cases, murder is directly related to getting out of bed.
Actually death has been linked to life. Research has showed that every single death is the result of being alive. Nobody has died from being not-alive and nobody dead has died again. Life can therefore be said to be a fatal sexually transmitted disease.
Undeath and zombiism were not included in the research, mainly due to lack of available undead creatures and zombies.
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Actually death has been linked to life. Research has showed that every single death is the result of being alive. Nobody has died from being not-alive and nobody dead has died again.
Yes, but he was talking about murder, not death in general. To both of you then I can add that murder in particular is directly related, in 100% of cases, to humans. Hence, the best way for us to get rid of murder is to get rid of human beings, the main advantage afterwards being that no one (or, rather, nothing else) will ever die from murderous causes again.
Anthropogenic Earthquake Theory (Score:3, Funny)
The Anthropogenic Earthquake Theory is a myth! There is no evidence that mankind's efforts have any effect whatsoever on earthquakes! Face the facts, people, Earth is big, man is small! There is no way that these--
Wait, did you say water wells?
Oh. Nevermind.
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If they had not drilled the wells, the pressure would have grown greater and when the quake happened it would have been a stronger quake. Silly article headline!
Or maybe not - maybe there would have been a series of smaller quakes that released the energy more gradually. Do you have some evidence that shows that human-induced quakes are of lower intensity than natural quakes?
Drilling deeper and deeper. (Score:5, Insightful)
That also means that they are consuming more water than what is replenished each year, which in the long run may be a more important issue than a quake every 25 years or so.
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Indeed, this is the kind of fact that that is at the same time disclosed and unknown, or maybe we don't want to know, or then it's buried in the many and silly non-informations in the Ecology area.
Emptying regional aquifers to raise cherries one month before the other European countries has been a national sport in Spain for dozens of years.
And this clearly results in documented papers which show all the other cultures (orchards...) had to be progressively abandoned, in favor of less and less demanding crop
We already exceed global H20 replenishment rate (Score:1)
According to Jeff Fulgham, the CEO of Banyan Water and the ex-lead of General Electric's ecomagination division, the global replenishment rate is about 4,200 km3 while 2010 use was at least 4,300 km3. This is only possible by drawing down surface reserves like lakes and aquafirs.
Water use also limits the amount of CO2 that we can sequester in soils and plants to an additional 500 GT or so because we'll sequester water with it and not have enough for us. 500 GT is about 15 years worth at the current burning
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According to Jeff Fulgham, the CEO of Banyan Water and the ex-lead of General Electric's ecomagination division, the global replenishment rate is about 4,200 km3 while 2010 use was at least 4,300 km3. This is only possible by drawing down surface reserves like lakes and aquafirs.
It's worth noting that this is two thirds the flow rate of the Amazon river. If you're not finding fresh water to replenish what you're using, then you're not trying.
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Yeah, because reducing the flow rate of the Amazon by two thirds couldn't possibly screw anything else up.
If it were taken where the Amazon empties into the ocean, yes, it probably wouldn't screw anything else up. We can do things like large scale desalinization and redirecting water from other locations.
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Usually caused by adding water (Score:5, Informative)
Human-induced earthquakes are usually caused by water injection, or more precisely by increasing pore fluid pressure which in turn has the effect of decreasing the rock's confining pressure. Basically, the water inside the rock pushes out in all directions with a (typically very high) pressure related to the height of the water column in hydrostatic communication with it above. The rock above is also pushing down, but other considerations aside, this confining pressure from the weight of the rocks tends to lock faults together preventing them from moving. The effective confining pressure is reduced by the pore fluid pressure pushing the rock apart. If you add to the water column the extra weight of the water may be minuscule compared to the increase in pressure caused by the greater height of the water column. That extra pore water pressure can then allow other forces, previously held in check by the rock's confining pressure, to break the fault causing an earthquake.
The most common place for this to occur is in filling new reservoirs and in deep waste injection wells used for disposal of fluids from oil and gas production. Suck quakes are usually very small, but I think they've been observed in rare cases above magnitude 5.
Removing water is a much less common cause of earthquakes. Pumping, for both water and oil, can ground subsidence, but rarely earthquakes. It will, however, subtly affect the balance of forces on a fault, so it's not inconceivable that it could cause a fault already near the breaking point to slip. I'd be curious to see the fault geometry and movement on the fault that caused the earthquake in Span.
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Also according to the same USGS page, the root cause was (no surprise) plate tectonics:
Achtung ! (Score:1)
They should have known better (Score:2)
a quake would likely have occurred? (Score:1)
a [stronger] quake would likely have occurred...
Yes, since the quake happened now, it would not be more powerful later. We should thank the person who triggered this one so the pressure did not keep building up for and even more catastrophic event. Maybe we should develop such equipment over here so that we can trigger smaller scheduled quakes in the California area. Triggering them on a timed schedule so that people could be prepared and take necessary precautio
Deep Wells (Score:2)
If the wells go all the way to New Zealand then you know they've gone too far
There have been quakes in New Zealand too.
Nobody expects... (Score:1)
Can we please not call them "scientists"? (Score:2)
dont create quakes, but change timing (Score:2)
One fear is the consolidation of natural small quakes into a larger bigger quake. Each earthquake is equivalent in energy to 30 quakes of smaller magnitude. Perhaps human activity may have many of these smaller quakes go off at once.
The inverse has been proposed to prevent damagi
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However, in order to seem relevant, I will post a link [slashdot.org] to something on the Internet, so that my post seems like a reasoned, researched, reply.
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Yes, I also find it hard to believe that they've drawn down water 1/4 kilometer. That is just amazingly bad.
The other hard-to-believe is how a 5.1 earthquake did so much damage. How poor are the building standards in Spain?
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Two things to consider
1: What really matters is not the absoloute strength of the quake it's how the strength compares to what those writing the building regs at the time of construction thought was likely to happen.
2: In europe we generally build are buildings to last and have been building them for a long time. Many people live in buildings that were built long before the rise of modern building regulations.
* Yes I know there were natives arround before that but afaict they didn't build much in the way of
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Just as an FYI, your statement #2 appears to be on the mark. I read more about the damage and the only accounts I could find indicated "historical" buildings had collapsed. So my questioning the building codes appears to be off the mark.