More X-Flares

X-FLARE THREAT CONTINUES: Sunspot AR1748 has already unleashed four X-class solar flares, but it might not be finished. The active region continues to grow beneath a delta-class magnetic field that harbors energy for powerful eruptions. NOAA puts the odds of another X-flare today at 60%. Solar flare alerts: text, voice.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory took this picture of AR1748 during the early hours of May 16th:

The sunspot is not particularly large, but it is complex, with many dark cores scattered through its zone of influence. This is a sign of a complicated overlying magnetic field. Magnetic complexity is the source of AR1748’s explosiveness: when tangled lines of magnetic force cross and reconnect–bang! A flare occurs.

All by itself, AR1748 has produced more X-flares than every other sunspot of the past year combined. In summary, AR1748 has given us an X1.7-class flare (0217 UT on May 13), an X2.8-class flare (1609 UT on May 13), an X3.2-class flare (0117 UT on May 14), and an X1-class flare (0152 on May 15). More could be in the offing.

fr/spaceweather.com

Two New Sunspots

TWO NEW SUNSPOTS: On Friday they didn’t exist. On Saturday they are big sunspots. Today, sunspots AR1726 and AR1727 are rapidly emerging in the sun’s northern hemisphere. The larger of the two, AR1726, contains nearly a dozen dark cores and spans 125,000 km from end to end. Click to view a 24-hour movie recorded by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory:

AR1726 is the fastest-growing and, so far, the most active. It is crackling with C-class flares and seems capable of producing even stronger M-class eruptions. Because of the sunspot’s central location on the solar disk, any explosions this weekend will be Earth-directed.

fr/spaceweather.com

Lyrid Meteor Showers 4/21-22

The Lyrid Meteor Shower

Every year in late April Earth passes through the dusty tail of Comet Thatcher (C/1861 G1), and the encounter causes a meteor shower–the Lyrids. This year the shower peaks on Monday morning, April 22nd. Forecasters expect 10 to 20 meteors per hour, although outbursts as high as 100 meteors per hour are possible.

Lyrid meteors appear to stream from the bright star Vega in the constellation Lyra:

In fact, Lyrids have nothing to do with Vega. The true source of the shower is Comet Thatcher. Every year in April, Earth plows through Thatcher’s dusty tail. Flakes of comet dust, most no bigger than grains of sand, strike Earth’s atmosphere traveling 49 km/s (110,000 mph) and disintegrate as streaks of light.

Lyrid meteors are typically as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper, which is to say of middling brightness. But some are more intense, even brighter than Venus. These “Lyrid fireballs” cast shadows for a split second and leave behind smokey debris trails that linger for minutes.

Occasionally, the shower intensifies. Most years in April there are no more than 5 to 20 meteors per hour during the shower’s peak. But sometimes, when Earth glides through an unusually dense clump of comet debris, the rate increases. Sky watchers in 1982, for instance, counted 90 Lyrids per hour. An even more impressive outburst was documented in 1803 by a journalist in Richmond, Virginia, who wrote:

“Shooting stars. This electrical [sic] phenomenon was observed on Wednesday morning last at Richmond and its vicinity, in a manner that alarmed many, and astonished every person that beheld it. From one until three in the morning, those starry meteors seemed to fall from every point in the heavens, in such numbers as to resemble a shower of sky rockets…” [ref]

What will the Lyrids do this year? The only way to know for sure is to go outside and look.

Experienced meteor watchers suggest the following viewing strategy: Dress warmly. Bring a reclining chair, or spread a thick blanket over a flat spot of ground. Lie down and look up somewhat toward the east. Meteors can appear in any part of the sky, although their trails will tend to point back toward the radiant–i.e., toward Vega.

Vega is a brilliant blue-white star about three times wider than our Sun and 25 light years away. You might have seen Vega in Carl Sagan’s movie Contact. It was the source of alien radio transmissions to Earth.

fr/spaceweather.com

Honshu, Japan Earthquake 4/12

Very dangerous earthquake hits Sumoto, Honshu, Japan

Last update: April 12, 2013 at 9:09 pm by By

 

Most important Earthquake Data:

Magnitude : 5.7 ; M6.0 JMA

Local Time (conversion only below land) : 2013-04-13 05:33:18

GMT/UTC Time : 2013-04-12 20:33:18

Depth (Hypocenter)  : 10 km

Update 21:11 UTC : Based on our experience with Japanese earthquakes, earthquake-report.com considers JMA 5+ intensity as a potentially dangerous shaking. This earthquake has been labeled with an intensity 6-, which is clearly above the ER damage level.
6-    Awaji-shi Gunge*, Awaji-shi Shizuki*
5+    Minami-awaji-shi Hirota*, Minami-awaji-shi Minato* and Awaji-shi Kuruma*

Update 21:08 UTC : NO tsunami alert is called by JMA Japan

Update 21:06 UTC : The full Awaji Island area has 157,000 people.
Kobe was obviously the most famous earthquake that was around this area in 1995.
With M6 and 5.3km depth, the USGS shakemap shows intensity VIII shaking and around $10 million damage.

Update 20:57 UTC : Sumoto, the city very close to the earthquake epicenter has approx. 50000 inhabitants

A strong earthquake has hit onshore of M6.0 and shallow.
JMA intensities of up to 6- are possible – which would cause damage near the epicenter. More to follow.

Dangerous intensity locations as provided by JMA Japan

Dangerous intensity locations as provided by JMA Japan

9km (6mi) NW of Sumoto, Japan
20km (12mi) NNE of Fukura, Japan
28km (17mi) SSW of Akashi, Japan
32km (20mi) NE of Naruto, Japan
465km (289mi) WSW of Tokyo, Japan

from:    http://earthquake-report.com/2013/04/12/strong-earthquake-near-s-coast-of-western-honshu-on-april-12-2013/

Strong Solar Flares

STRONG SOLAR FLARE: The magnetic field of sunspot AR1719 erupted on April 11th at 0716 UT, producing an M6-class solar flare. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the explosion’s extreme ultraviolet flash:

Shortly after the flare, a CME emerged from the blast site. NOAA forecasters estimate a 60% chance of geomagnetic storms on April 13th when the cloud reaches Earth. High-latitude sky watchers, be alert for auroras!

fr/spaceweather.com

Sunspot Alert

DOUBLE-BARRELED SUNSPOTS: Earth is staring down a double-barreled threat for solar flares–that is, sunspots AR1718 and AR1719. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory photographed the pair during the early hours of April 10th:

Each of these sunspots has a ‘beta-gamma’ magnetic field that harbors energy for M-class flares. Of the two, AR1718 appears more likely to erupt. It is growing rapidly and is already crackling with lesser C-class flares. Any explosions today will be Earth-directed.

fr/spaceweather.com

What’s There to Share

The Gen Y Guide to Collaborative Consumption

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The following is an excerpt from the essay anthology Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis, edited by Malcolm Harris & Neal Gorenflo, available from New Society Publishers

 

When our parents graduated from college, the bachelor’s degree was a coveted badge of honor. It gave applicants instant cred (and usually a larger paycheck) no matter what the job. Now, having a bachelor’s degree does nothing to make an applicant stand out from the masses. And if you’re applying for a job well below your skill level because you’re desperate for a paycheck, that B.S. degree will probably get your carefully crafted resume tossed in the trash.

American youth are slowly realizing that the old system is broken, and no longer holds the answer to all their dreams and desires. We’re discovering that stable, satisfying careers can be found outside the offices and factories around which our parents and grandparents built their lives. We’re acknowledging that the pursuit of bigger, better, and faster things have plunged our country into a time of despair and difficulty. We’re convinced that business as usual isn’t an option any longer–but what’s the alternative?

Together, we’re learning that instead of waiting for politicians and corporations to fix the system, it’s possible to create a better one of our own, right under their noses. A new way of living, in which access is valued over ownership, experience is valued over material possessions, and “mine” becomes “ours” so everyone’s needs are met without waste.

If these ideas get your blood pumping, there’s good news: young people all over the world are already making them a reality. It’s called collaborative consumption, (or the sharing economy) and it’s changing the way we work, play, and interact with each other. It’s fueled by the instant connection and communication of the internet, yet it’s manifesting itself in interesting ways offline too.

If you’re ready to connect with people who can help you save money, pursue your passions, and reduce waste, here’s a quick-start guide to your sharing experience:

1. Remove all items from the box and assess

Sit down with yourself (or some friends) and talk about what you’ve got, what you need, and what you could live without. Take stock of what you’d be willing to share, rent, or give away. Write down all the things you really need to be productive/happy/connected. Then, cross out all the things that you want just to have them, and highlight all the things that involve a valuable experience. Now you have a list you can tackle through sharing.

2. Connect to the power source

The collaborative consumption movement empowers people to thrive despite economic climate. Instead of looking to the government or corporations to tell us what we want or create a solution for our problems, we take action to meet our own needs in a creative fashion. This is our power source. Start looking for ways to share at school, on community billboards, by asking friends, or use the resources below (US-based unless noted otherwise):

Housing

Social Food

Personal Finance

  • Lending Club – An online financial community that brings together creditworthy borrowers and savvy investors so that both can benefit financially.
  • Zopa (UK) – Where people get together to lend and borrow money directly with each other, sidestepping the banks for a better deal.
  • Prosper – A peer-to-peer lending site that allows people to invest in each other in a way that is financially and socially rewarding.
  • SmartyPig – social savings bank that enables you to save for specific goals and engage friends and family to contribute.
  • How to Save Money by Sharing

Entrepreneurship / Work

Travel

  • CouchSurfing – An international network that connects travelers with free accommodations offered by locals in over 230 countries. There’s no better way to immerse yourself in the local culture than to stay with an friendly local.
  • Airbnb – the leading a fee-based service that connects people who have space to share with travelers looking for lodging, all over the world. Also check out similar services iStopOverRoomorama, and Tripping. Save a ton of money and connect to the local scene through these peer to peer lodging sites.
  • How To Swap Cities – a guide on how to swap offices with someone from another city inspired by SwapYourShop.
  • Try out Vayable or Guidehop for tours and experiences created by independent locals for those seeking authentic experiences.

Land / Gardening

Transportation

Media (Books, Movies, Games, Music)

  • Swap.com – The leading online swap marketplace for books, movies, music and games.  Amazing selection. Update: now swapping everything.
  • BookMooch – Lets you swap books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want.
  • Goozex – A trading platform for video games and movies.
  • Paperback Swap – Trade paperback books for free. Also DVDs and CDs.

Clothing

Redistribution Sites (where unneeded stuff finds a loving home)

  • Freecycle – The original grassroots organization for giving and getting free stuff in your town.
  • Craigslist – This is the ultimate free classified site with categories for free stuff, shares, barters, sublets, garage sales, house swaps, tons of used stuff for sale, and more. New in town? You can set yourself up with a job, an apartment, furniture, and a date all from this site.
  • eBay – International online auction that allows you to buy from and sell to other individuals.
  • Try out Zaarly, a classified service optimized for smartphones.

Renting and sharing of general goods where you live

  • RentalicNeighborgoodsKeepioSnapGoods and Zilok (US & Europe) are leading peer to peer rental and sharing marketplaces.
  • Do you want to co-own something with friends or family? Jointli and Sharezen are the perfect tools to buy, use, and manage a shared asset like cars, boats, planes, tools, real estate, and more.

Campus

  • Chegg – Rent expensive textbooks on the cheap.
  • Better World Books – Save big on used textbooks.
  • CafeScribe – A new service that lets you download electronic copies of your textbook, add friends, and share your notes.
  • GradeGuru – A leading student notesharing and social network.
  • Free Technology Academy – free college classes on open source technology and standards.
  • Open Courseware – free college course materials offered by scores of top universities from around the world. Also check out MIT’s free classes.

Other Guides:

If you don’t see the sharing solution you need, check out our huge list of how to share guides on Shareable.  Or add resources you know about in comments.

3. Press the power button

Once you discover local opportunities for sharing and collaborating, it’s time to add the power: you. Get involved. Create a profile on sharing/renting/bartering site and actually list some stuff you could trade. Contact the moderator of a local offline sharing group and offer up your goods or services. Collaborative consumption requires a venture into a social world, even if it’s only online; you need to get out there.

4. Sync with other devices and enjoy

Ideas like eBay, Netflix, and GameFly are pretty well-known examples of sharing, but it’s important to remember that options exist offline as well. Sure, the internet makes it safe for us to share with strangers, but that doesn’t mean you should forget about the satisfaction of sharing face-to-face. Coworking brings collaboration into your professional life; a local food co-op brings sharing into your pantry, and skill-sharing communities bring comraderie to your weekend hobbies.

Don’t be afraid to let sharing/bartering/collaborating go viral in other areas of your life as well. You’ll discover, as Rachel Botsman does in What’s Mine is Yours, that “over time, these experiences create a deep shift in consumer mindset. Consumption is no longer an asymmetrical activity of endless acquisition but a dynamic push and pull of giving and collaborating in order to get what you want. Along the way, the acts of collaboration and giving become an end in itself.”

from:    http://www.realitysandwich.com/gen_y_guide_collaborative_consumption

The “Mutual Class”

From the Middle Class to the Mutual Class

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Americans have the tools and money to create an America where all workers are employed, whose every square mile is beautiful; whose cities are safe playgrounds for children; whose food is fresh and affordable; whose waters are clean from sea to crystal sea.  An America run by Americans for Americans is fully capable of rebuilding all homes so they’re earthquake-proof, hurricane-proof, tornado-proof, flood-proof, drought-proof, fireproof, and bank-proof.  When Americans take control of money, we are wealthy enough to build an America where it’s easy to stay healthy and to get healed; where costs of living get smaller and our lives get bigger.

What blocks these goals?  Both Us and Them.

On the one hand, all of America’s institutions have become too big to change.  Like sumo wrestlers in a basketball game, they move too slow.  Big Government, Big Oil, Big Insurance, Big Finance, Big Agriculture, Big Highway, Big Education, Big Military, Big Prison, Big Police, Big Poverty — these feed on disaster and control.  They no longer exist primarily to fix problems, but to grow.

Then on the other hand, millions of us are employed by these institutions to enforce the past.  Millions of us depend on their stocks.  Many of us watch their commercials and obey their laws.  Many prefer dull safety to risky action, even to save America.  We drive straight, even when the road curves.

Therefore American politics wallows like a car stuck in mud with an elephant sitting on the roof, dragged by a lazy donkey, going nowhere but deeper.

As a result, the Middle Class dream has become a burden sinking millions through mortgage, insurance, utilities, tuition, credit card fees, cars and fashion.  Consumerism by liberals and conservatives alike has depleted America’s essential resources and our national sovereignty.

The next American generations will never achieve Middle Class excess.  That’s good for the planet and tough for them.  Fortunately, though, Millennials can become a prosperous Mutual Class by starting genuinely nonprofit mutual aid systems that enable them to live well by sharing resources.  Such programs were widespread and successful one hundred years ago.

Through them we create millions of jobs that revive our neighborhoods.  We give ourselves raises by lowering prices.  And all our current skills are employed while we enjoy new talents.

Young and old, we will become the government as we create these regional food systems and regional stock exchanges, establish green co-housing programs and green labor administrations, reduce dependence on fossil fuels toward zero, replace automobile space with train and bike space, convert vacant urban land into greenhouses and orchards, develop co-operative health plans and clinics, issue our own education credentials and our own community money.

Such local systems prepare us to take power by creating parallel authority.  By taking power together we regain time for creative individuality.  We move from dependence to ownership.

The Mutual Class will also pioneer Mutual Enterprise — local businesses committed to community, ecology, and social justice.

Let’s look at a sample Mutual Day.  We start with sex and music, then breakfast.  We walk or bike to work, four days per week.  After three hours work, we return home for a long lunch and sex, or we eat with co-workers: we discuss work plans, utility and durability of product, marketing, sales, prices and wages.  Then two more hours of work.  We have time and energy for an afternoon stroll or game, then prepare dinner, make music, make love (Why so much sex?  Because we’re relaxed).  We finish with an evening stroll in our beautiful neighborhood.

To achieve such better dreams, Americans must at the same time confront anti-American institutions.  Laws that forbid urgent change are a cage for us to die in.  Regulations must be broken when they block American liberation from debt, layoffs, foreclosure and bankruptcy, earthquakes, tornados, floods, heat waves, cold snaps, blackouts and traffic jams.

This is merely the revolutionary American tradition that ended slavery, gained votes for women, won the eight-hour workday, secured civil rights, and started this nation.  By contrast, conferences and elections are powerless displays.

Yet the most direct path to deflate bad authority is to withdraw personal dependence.  Time to leave the car in the mud and get back on track.  Use train, bike or feet rather than car.  Shop less and shop local.  Move your money into a local bank or credit union.  Insulate your housing.  Be a creator, not a consumer.  Eat less meat or none.  Have one or fewer children.

The next America will look entirely different than the one we know.  We’ll have fun building it and our grandchildren will thank us.  America went to the moon.  Now America will go to the future.

 

from:    http://www.realitysandwich.com/middle_class_mutual

On Earthquakes, Fracking, & Denial

Fracking’s Latest Scandal? Earthquake Swarms

Turns out that when a barely regulated industry injects highly pressurized wastewater into faults, things can go terribly wrong.

—By

At exactly 10:53 p.m. on Saturday, November 5, 2011, Joe and Mary Reneau were in the bedroom of their whitewashed and brick-trimmed home, a two-story rambler Mary’s dad custom-built 43 years ago. Their property encompasses 440 acres of rolling grasslands in Prague, Oklahoma (population 2,400), located 50 miles east of Oklahoma City. When I arrive at their ranch almost a year later on a bright fall morning, Joe is wearing a short-sleeve shirt and jeans held up by navy blue suspenders, and is wedged into a metal chair on his front stoop sipping black coffee from a heavy mug. His German shepherd, Shotzie, is curled at his feet. Joe greets me with a crushing handshake—he is 200 pounds, silver-haired and 6 feet tall, with thick forearms and meaty hands—and invites me inside. He served in Vietnam, did two tours totaling nine years with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and then, in 1984, retired a lieutenant colonel from the US Army to sell real estate and raise cattle. Today, the livestock are gone and Joe calls himself “semiretired” because “we still cut hay in the summers.”

On that night in November, just as he and Mary were about to slip into bed, there was “a horrendous bang, like an airliner crashing in our backyard,” Joe recalls. Next came 60 seconds of seismic terror. “The dust was flying and we were hanging onto the bed watching the walls go back and forth.” Joe demonstrates by hunching over and gripping the mattress in their bedroom. He points to the bathroom. “The mirror in the vanity exploded as if somebody blew it out with a shotgun.” When the shaking stopped, Joe surveyed the damage. “Every corner of the house was fractured,” he says. The foundation had sunk two inches. But most frightening was what Joe discovered in the living room: “Our 28-foot-tall freestanding chimney had come through the roof.” It had showered jagged debris onto a brown leather sofa positioned in front of their flat-screen TV. Joe shows me the spot. “It’s Mary’s favorite perch. Had she been here…” He chokes up.

Joe and Mary Reneau

Joe and Mary Reneau Photograph by Ben Sklar

The earthquake registered a magnitude 5.7*—the largest ever recorded in Oklahoma—with its epicenter less than two miles from the Reneaus’ house, which took six months to rebuild. It injured two people, destroyed 14 homes, toppled headstones, closed schools, and was felt in 17 states. It was preceded by a 4.7 foreshock the morning prior and followed by a 4.7 aftershock.

The quake baffled seismologists. The only possible culprit was the Wilzetta Fault, a 320-million-year-old rift lurking between Prague and nearby Meeker. “But the Wilzetta was a dead fault that nobody ever worried about,” says Katie Keranen, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Oklahoma. We’re driving in her red SUV, just south of the Reneaus’ property, when she stops to point out where the quake tore open a footwide fissure across State Highway 62. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) maintains a database of seismically risky areas. Its assessment of the Wilzetta Fault, Keranen notes, was “zero probability of expected ground motion. This fault is like an extinct volcano. It should never have been active.”

When the Wilzetta mysteriously and violently awakened, Keranen wanted to know why. So she partnered with scientists from the USGS and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The morning after the initial foreshock, Keranen’s team scrambled to install three seismometers around Prague. They did so in time to capture the quake system in unprecedented detail. She says, “We got this beautiful image of the fault plane.” Within a week, her team and other scientists had placed a total of 25 devices around the fault zone. One is buried in the Reneaus’ backyard. Now, having completed a yearlong study (just published in the journal Geology), Keranen’s research indicates the Oklahoma earthquakes were likely attributable to underground injection of wastewater derived from “dewatering,” separating crude oil from the soupy brine reaped through a drilling technique that allows previously inaccessible oil to be pumped up. “Pretty much everybody who looks at our data accepts that these events were likely caused by injection,” Keranen concludes.

“We still feel tremors weekly,” complains Joe Reneau. “They rattle our windows.” The couple hasn’t bothered to rehang family photos in their living room. Instead, the framed snapshots are stacked in tidy piles on a coffee table.

“The Wilzetta was a dead fault that nobody ever worried about.” Then the drillers came. And so did a swarm of quakes.

Such seismic activity isn’t normal here. Between 1972 and 2008, the USGS recorded just a few earthquakes a year in Oklahoma. In 2008, there were more than a dozen; nearly 50 occurred in 2009. In 2010, the number exploded to more than 1,000. These so-called “earthquake swarms” are occurring in other places where the ground is not supposed to move. There have been abrupt upticks in both the size and frequency of quakes in Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio, and Texas. Scientists investigating these anomalies are coming to the same conclusion: The quakes are linked to injection wells. Into most of them goes wastewater from hydraulic fracking, while some, as those in Prague, are filled with leftover fluid from dewatering operations.

The impact of fossil fuels is no secret, but until now the short list of dirty energy’s villains never included water. Together, oil and gas extraction and production generate about 878 billion gallons of wastewater annually, roughly what tumbles over Niagara Falls every two weeks. More than a third is injected back into disposal wells. With natural gas production on the rise—it has jumped 26 percent since 2007, chiefly because fracking now makes it economically viable to pursue gas trapped in shale deposits—and unconventional practices such as dewatering ramping up domestic oil development, the wastewater deluge is expected to get worse. Operators are injecting more water than ever into drilling wells, while boring new wells to accommodate the overflow. Yet nobody really knows how all this water will impact faults, or just how big an earthquake it could spawn. In the West, small quakes don’t often cause much damage because of stricter seismic regulations but also because the underground formations—buckled, with younger rock—absorb all but the biggest events. Induced quakes, however, are happening primarily in flatter states, amid more rigid rock, making them more destructive—a stone makes a bigger splash when it’s hurled into a glassy pond than a river of raging whitewater.

For its part, industry is doing its best to avoid discussing the issue publicly, even as its leading professional guild, the Society of Petroleum Engineers, recognized the matter was serious enough to call its first-ever meeting devoted to “injection induced seismicity.” Held in September, the SPE’s 115-member workshop sought to “better understand and mitigate potential risks.” When I reached out to SPE coordinator Amy Chao, she told me, “I appreciate your interest but press is not allowed to attend in any fashion.” My requests to speak with geophysicists at leading oil and gas companies implicated in injection-induced earthquakes were also ignored or denied. I did manage to speak with Jean Antonides, vice president of exploration for New Dominion, which operates one of the wells near the Wilzetta Fault. He informed me that people claiming to know the true source of the Oklahoma quakes are “either lying to your face or they’re idiots.”

Nonetheless, there’s growing concern among state officials. After a spate of quakes linked to injection wells shook northern Arkansas, the state’s oil and gas commission declared a moratorium on underground wastewater disposal activities within a 1,000-square-mile area encompassing the towns of Guy and Greenbrier and required seismic-risk studies in the greater Fayetteville Shale area. Affected residents filed a class-action lawsuit against Chesapeake Energy and BHP Billiton Petroleum—the first time anyone has sued oil and gas companies for causing an earthquake. After an injection well was linked to quakes in Youngstown, Ohio, Gov. John Kasich issued an executive order requiring operators to conduct seismic studies before the state will issue well permits. So far, Ohio is alone in this regard; no other state—or the federal government—requires any type of seismic-risk assessment for all of its injection wells. And that worries scientists: “Nobody is talking to one another about this,” says William Ellsworth, a prominent USGS geophysicist who’s published more than 100 papers on earthquakes. Among other mishaps, Ellsworth worries that a well could pierce an unknown fault “five miles from a nuclear power plant.”
The EPA classifies and regulates underground injection wells—some 700,000 and counting—based on what goes into them. There are six categories. Class VI wells sequester carbon dioxide; Class V wells store nonhazardous fluids; nuclear waste is stashed in Class IV wells; Class III wells are used in mining salt, uranium, copper, and sulfur; industrial chemicals get stored in Class I wells. Wastewater from oil and gas operations is discharged—typically by injecting it under pressure—into Class II wells.

There are at least 155,000 Class II wells in the United States. Of these about 80 percent are involved in recovering hydrocarbons, predominantly through slick-water hydrofracking, a technique developed by Halliburton. Fracking fluid—water blended with lubricants, thickeners, disinfectants, and other compounds—is pumped into well bores at extremely high pressures. Eventually, the fluid reverses course and—along with millions of gallons of salt water that resides underground—ascends to the surface. The “flowback,” now laden with natural gas, is collected, the gas is extracted, and the residual fluid is pumped into disposal wells. There are roughly 40,000 of these, and they can be up to 13,000 feet deep.

The extraction process itself doesn’t generally produce earthquakes. This is because of something known as pore pressure, a measurement of how much stress a fluid exerts into the “pores” of surrounding rock. The whole aim of fracking is to rapidly increase pore pressure just long enough to cleave fissures into sediment and free trapped gas, after which time pore pressure equalizes, easing the subterranean stress. Only rarely is pore pressure high enough in a fracking well to cause an earthquake that can be felt at the surface.

But while fracking wells are intended to withstand high pore pressure, wastewater disposal wells are not. When pore pressure spikes in disposal wells, it can move rock. Disposal wells are drilled into vast, permeable formations—think giant sponges—where there’s plenty of space for water to spread out. But because water is heavy, the more of it that is sluiced into a well, the more it weighs on the rock below. And as Scott Ausbrooks, a geologist with the Arkansas Geological Survey, points out, “Water does not like to be squeezed.” Eventually it finds an escape route, “just like a room of people. The more you put in, the more crowded it gets, and at some point, people are going to start being pushed out the doors.”

Animated GIF: fracked Up?

Drillers inject high-pressure fluids into a hydraulic fracturing well, making slight fissures in the shale that release natural gas. The wastewater that flows back up with the gas is then transported to disposal wells, where it is injected deep into porous rock. Scientists now believe that the pressure and lubrication of that wastewater can cause faults to slip and unleash an earthquake.

how fracking causes earthquakes

Illustration: Leanne Kroll. Animation: Brett Brownell

With the oil and gas boom generating record amounts of wastewater, these rooms are getting increasingly jam-packed. Exactly how much? The EPA tracks volumes but wouldn’t provide them; agency officials declined numerous requests for interviews. Companies are also pumping into denser rock, or into deeper formations that are inherently unstable. “There’s much more injection going on today where there wasn’t injection before,” says Cliff Frohlich, associate director of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas-Austin, who recently identified a cluster of wells at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport as the likely culprit for nearby earthquakes.

Too much wastewater in a disposal well forces liquid downward and outward, he adds. It can meander for months, creeping into unknown faults and prying the rock apart just enough to release pent-up energy. Frohlich describes this as the “air hockey” effect. A puck on an air hockey table won’t move even if the table is tilted upward a few degrees. “It would just sit there,” he says. “But when you turn on the air, it reduces the friction and the puck will slide. There are faults most everywhere. Most of them are stuck, because rock on rock is pretty sticky. But if you pump a fluid in there to reduce the friction, they can slip.”

*It should be noted that the United States Geological Survey used two different techniques to estimate the earthquake magnitude at 5.6. The Global Centroid-Moment-Tensor Project at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University used different methods to measure it at 5.7. As Justin Rubinstein of the USGS told us, this type of variance is not unusual, and the measurements are considered consistent.

hat’s exactly what happened in northern Arkansas, where, according to state geologist Ausbrooks, water from several injection wells pushed apart the two sides of a fault, “allowing it to slip and start popping off the earthquakes”—thousands of them. Ausbrooks, along with Stephen Horton, a University of Memphis seismologist, identified the source: a previously unknown seven-mile-long fault that hadn’t budged in modern times. Though not huge, the fault is still long enough to generate a magnitude-6.0 earthquake. (In 1993, when an equal-size temblor hit Klamath Falls, Oregon, it killed two people and caused $7.3 million worth of damage—in a rural area.)

While the largest faults in the United States are documented and mapped—the San Andreas, New Madrid, Cascadia, and dozens of others—”there are faults everywhere, and some are too small to be seen,” explains Mark Zoback, a professor of geophysics at Stanford University who was on the National Academy of Engineering committee that investigated the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. “A fault can be missed that could produce an earthquake large enough to cause some moderate damage.”

Oil and gas companies say they don’t cause quakes but refuse to provide scientists or regulators the data to prove it.

Scarier still is that any fault, no matter how minuscule, can instigate the domino effect scientists have observed during injection-induced earthquakes. “The scenario we worry about is one earthquake spawning another,” says the USGS’s Ellsworth. This phenomenon was evident in Oklahoma, Keranen says, where “we had one fault-plane go, a second one, and then a third one. They ruptured in sequence.” The first tremor in Prague sprang from a minor fault that collided with a larger fault, sparking the quake that trashed Joe and Mary Reneau’s home, along with a dozen others.

How far from the site of an injection well could a quake occur? Scientists aren’t sure. In Arkansas, along the fault discovered by Ausbrooks, tremors emanated nearly 10 miles. Had those quakes collided with another fault, the shaking might have extended much farther. “Once it starts moving, it’s like a chain reaction,” notes Ausbrooks.
All these factors were in play in Youngstown, where D&L Energy Group conducted an experiment, burrowing 200 feet into solid rock known as the Precambrian layer, according to Heidi Hetzel-Evans, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. Tremors began three months after wastewater entered the well. The strongest, a 4.0, struck on New Year’s Eve. Wastewater had seeped nearly 2,500 feet beyond the bottom of the borehole into an unknown fault. “There will be no more drilling into Precambrian rock in Ohio,” Hetzel-Evans dryly tells me.

John Armbruster, a seismologist at Lamont-Doherty who was among those summoned to Youngstown, told me, “This well caused these earthquakes. There were no felt earthquakes in Youngstown in 100 years.” Within a year of the well opening, there were “12 felt earthquakes. After the well was shut down, the number decreased dramatically. You’d need Powerball odds for that to be a coincidence.”

There is no shortage of evidence. After quakes struck near Trinidad, Colorado, in 2011, the USGS set up a monitoring network. “A magnitude-5.3 earthquake occurred within two kilometers of two high-volume injection wells,” says Justin Rubinstein, who is part of a new USGS project to study human-induced seismicity. “These earthquakes were caused by fluid injection.” Ditto in Dallas; as UT-Austin’s Frohlich points out, “These earthquakes could have been anywhere. They weren’t. Virtually all of them were near injection wells.”

earthquake swarm oklahoma

Earthquakes near Prague, Oklahoma, from November 5, 2011, through December 4, 2011. Red indicates 2.2 magnitude; magenta represents the 5.7-magnitude quake. KellyMcD/Flickr

Ellsworth, who peer-reviewed Keranen’s study, has researched earthquakes for more than 40 years and is a recipient of the Department of the Interior’s highest honor for his contributions to seismology. He studied geophysics at Stanford, earned his doctorate from MIT, and is the former president of the Seismological Society of America. When I asked him if there is any doubt among his colleagues about what produced the quakes in Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas, he replied, “Injection of wastewater into Class II wells has induced earthquakes, including the ones you cite.” Rubinstein agrees: “In my opinion, it’s pretty clear in all of these cases—Youngstown, Arkansas, DFW, Trinidad, and Oklahoma—that injection wells were the cause.”

Does industry concur? Jim Gipson, director of media relations for Chesapeake Energy, operator of the wells under DFW airport and a now-closed well near Greenbrier, Arkansas, declined my request for an interview. Hal Macartney, geoscience adviser for Pioneer Natural Resources, which owns some of the wells implicated in the Colorado quakes, dodged my calls and emails for three weeks. Even those not implicated directly with quake-causing wells are staying silent. Hydrofracking pioneer Norman Warpinski, who works for Halliburton, refused comment. Geophysicist Mark Houston and managing partner Steve Sadoskas, at oilfield-services provider Baker Hughes, wouldn’t talk. Julie Shemeta, founder of MEQ Geo, a firm that does seismic consulting for oil and gas exploration, said she was too busy for a 15-minute phone call even though I offered her a two-month window to schedule it.

I’m not the only one getting rebuffed. There is “a lack of companies cooperating with scientists,” complains seismologist Armbruster. “I was naive and thought companies would work with us. But they are stonewalling us, saying they don’t believe they are causing the quakes.” Admitting guilt could draw lawsuits and lead to new regulation. So it’s no surprise, says Rubinstein, “that industry is going to keep data close to their chest.” When I ask Jean Antonides, New Dominion’s VP of exploration, why the industry is sequestering itself from public inquiry, he replies, “Nobody wants to be the face of this thing.” Plenty of misdeeds are pinned on oil and gas companies; none wants to add earthquakes to the list.

The USGS’s Ellsworth tells me that some operators track seismic data near well sites but won’t share it, and so far there is no state or national regulatory requirement to do so. And the “Halliburton Loophole” written into the 2005 energy bill at the behest of then-Vice President (and former Halliburton CEO) Dick Cheney excludes hydrofrackers from certain EPA regulations, among them provisions related to “the underground injection of fluids…related to oil, gas, or geothermal production activities.” Upshot: “It’s an age where information has exploded, but this is an area where we’re still working in punch cards,” Ellsworth says.

Just knowing the daily volumes of water being pumped into a well would yield critical clues. “There is a correlation that shows the largest earthquakes tend to be associated with the largest volume wells,” adds Ellsworth. Ideally, the USGS would get real-time data. But operators are only required to track monthly volumes, and those tallies are often delayed six months or more. By then, it’s too late. Rubinstein wants “industry to actually give us hourly or daily injection pressures and volume, so we can model where the fluids are going and predict how the stress evolves over time…and be able to come up with some probabilistic sense of how likely you are to generate an earthquake.”

As for Keranen’s explosive research on the Wilzetta Fault, New Dominion’s Antonides is recruiting his own scientists to produce a report challenging it. Meanwhile, he has his own theories. “The traffic driving across the freeway could have caused it,” he says, adding that another “trigger point” is the two large aquifers that bracket the fault. Drought has reduced their water levels, “removing a lot of the weight” and allowing the ground underneath to “rebound” and perhaps release energy in a pent-up fault. “All this stuff is tied together—the aquifers, plus trucks driving across the freeway, plus water disposal, plus 50-story buildings—the whole system of man.” (This hypothesis has some basis in reality. Scientists in Taiwan fear that the weight of a skyscraper unhinged faults underlying Taipei. Though no such structure, it must be said, is found within 50 miles of Prague, Oklahoma.)

Nine days after the New Year’s Eve quake in Youngstown, D&L Energy Group issued a statement that said, “There has been no conclusive link established between our well and the earthquakes. Proximity alone does not prove causation.” In March 2012, state officials published a report explicitly detailing the connection, noting that the recent quakes were “distinct from previous seismic activity in the region because of their proximity to a Class II deep injection well. In fact, all of the events were clustered less than a mile around the well.” But D&L still questions the new findings—even though the quakes petered out soon after the company voluntarily shut down its well.

Ausbrooks and Horton partnered for nearly a year to research the Arkansas earthquakes, driving around the state to install seismometers and collect data. And yet when it came time to publish the results in a leading scholarly journal, Seismological Research Letters, Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe forced Ausbrooks to remove his name as coauthor. Ausbrooks’ boss at the Arkansas Geological Survey is Bekki White, who did two decades of consulting for the petroleum industry prior to her current post. “Ms. White conferred with our office,” Matt DeCample, a Beebe spokesman, tells me. “We felt that putting the state and/or Mr. Ausbrooks as a coauthor would represent additional academic credentials beyond their usual scope of work. The survey is in the business of data collection, not interpreting that data and reaching conclusions.” When I ask Ausbrooks for a better explanation, he laughs nervously. “Oh, let’s just say, I want to say, but I can’t. I’ll just put it this way: There’s money and politics involved.” (The state collects $14 million in property taxes from Chesapeake Energy alone.)

Fracking is an area where conflicts of interest seem particularly apt to emerge. In December, UT-Austin was forced to retract a much-ballyhooed study showing that fracking didn’t pollute groundwater after Bloomberg News and an independent analysis by the Public Accountability Initiative revealed that the lead author (and former head of the USGS), Charles Groat, had received an undisclosed 10,000 shares a year and an annual fee ($58,500 in 2011) from a fracking company. The head of UT-Austin’s Energy Institute, Raymond Orbach, also stepped down. (Groat is now the head of the Water Institute of the Gulf in Louisiana; Orbach remains at UT.)

Seismologists and geophysicists who work in academia often consult for the oil and gas industry. For example, Stanford’s Zoback is on the board of the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America, a nonprofit oil and gas advocacy group whose charter is to “effectively deliver hydrocarbons from domestic resources to the citizens of the United States.” Its members include Halliburton, Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips. During our conversations, he peppers his answers to my queries with caveats. “People forget that earthquakes are a natural geologic process, and in most of the cases, what the [injection wells] are doing is relieving forces already in the Earth’s crust on faults that would have someday produced an earthquake anyway—maybe thousands of years from now. The oil industry has a history of operating 155,000 [wells] without a problem. Now we have a handful of cases. Without seeming like I’m taking industry’s side, where is the problem?”

Keranen, too, juggles conflicting interests. When we talk, she occasionally cuts herself off mid-sentence and then confesses, apologetically, “I have to be careful what I say.” Her research on the Prague quakes hasn’t been published and she seems concerned it might antagonize those who will decide on her academic tenure. Randy Keller is the chair of the University of Oklahoma’s ConocoPhillips School of Geology and Geophysics. In 2007, the energy behemoth donated $6 million to the university, earning it top billing. Keller is also director of the Oklahoma Geological Survey, which has a mandate to “promote wise use of Oklahoma’s natural resources.” Such alliances make it difficult for him to point fingers. In December 2011, the OGS published an official position statement on induced seismicity, emphasizing that quakes could easily originate through natural dynamics and that “a rush to judgment” would be “harmful to state, public, and industry interests.”

When I emailed Keller in October to inquire whether the OGS had modified its assessment in the face of Keranen’s findings, he replied, “We do feel that the location of these events…the nature of the aftershock sequence, and the focal mechanisms can be explained by a natural event.” A few hours later, he sent me a follow-up. “I wonder if you understand what I was trying to say. We have never flatly said that the injection wells did not trigger the earthquakes. Our opinion is that we do not yet have the data and research results to make a definitive statement about this issue.” Keranen walks the same line, saying that her study will show that wastewater injection “very potentially” roused the Wilzetta Fault. Politics aside, there’s widespread scientific consensus that unregulated wastewater injection presents a serious risk to public safety. “We’re seeing mid-5.0 earthquakes, and they’ve caused significant damage,” Rubinstein says. “We’re beyond nuisance.”

So what would the scientists do? One option is to require operators to check geological records before drilling new wells. The Wilzetta, mapped during Oklahoma’s 1950s oil boom, could have been avoided. Another approach is using high-frequency sound waves to render three-dimensional images of underlying faults—technology that oil and gas companies already employ to hunt for untapped reservoirs. For existing wells, operators could set up seismometers to capture the tremors that often portend larger events. Finally, simply pumping less water into wells might mitigate earthquakes. Horton attempted to test this tactic in Arkansas. “We suggested reducing the amount of fluid they were injecting and continue [seismic] monitoring. We actually submitted a proposal to the industry to do that and they blew us off.” Ohio’s regulations for Class II wells, effective as of October, encompass many of these proposals.

Stanford’s Zoback is not opposed to regulation, so long as it’s not a knee-jerk reaction: “Three things are predictable whenever earthquakes occur that might be caused by fluid injection: The companies involved deny it, the regulators go into a brain freeze because they don’t know what to do, and the press goes into a feeding frenzy because they get to beat up on the oil and gas industry, whether it is responsible or not. While I’m making a joke here, there is currently no framework for scientifically based regulation. Assessing and managing the risk associated with triggered seismicity is a complex issue. The last thing we want to implement is a bunch of new regulations that are well meaning but ineffective and unduly burdensome.”

Getting regulators to agree on new rules is not going to be easy, because the connection between injection wells and earthquakes is inherently circumstantial. Seismologists can’t situate sensors miles underground the instant an earthquake occurs, which means they might never be absolutely certain that wastewater and not natural forces led to the rupture. Frohlich puts it this way: “If you do the statistics, smoking causes lung cancer. But that doesn’t mean that smoking caused your lung cancer.” Ultimately, the courts may decide how much evidence is enough, if the lawsuit in Arkansas goes to trial.

Until then, the Reneaus face more home repairs and an uncertain future. When I leave, Joe walks me out to the driveway. Resurfaced after it buckled in the quake, it’s already showing hairline cracks from recent tremors. Joe blames injection wells but thinks culpability will be hard to come by. “My theory is that even if God came down and said, ‘You oil company guys are at fault,’ they would still deny it. The only thing that’s going to stop this is another big earthquake.”

from:    http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/03/does-fracking-cause-earthquakes-wastewater-dewatering?page=3