May 30, 2008
Elaine Meinel Supkis
Energy use and geology: hand in glove. The majority of geologists in college go into energy markets. The coal industry is struggling to deal with pollution from coal burning. One solution is to pump all the excess gases into the earth. I am totally against this for geological reasons. Just as the holding of any pollutants inside the earth is simply moving forwards in time the consequences of our own pollution is a bad idea. And the earth has just switched gears yet again after the huge series of powerful quakes in China have begun to fade. The Mid-atlantic rift is now having big quakes, the latest being in Iceland. And a geologist is reading a paper about earthquake clusters and how they are global after big quake events.
For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground.
Scientists need to figure out which kinds of rock and soil formations are best at holding carbon dioxide. They need to be sure the gas will not bubble back to the surface. They need to find optimal designs for new power plants so as to cut costs. And some complex legal questions need to be resolved, such as who would be liable if such a project polluted the groundwater or caused other damage far from the power plant.
Major corporations sense the possibility of a profitable new business, and G.E. signed a partnership on Wednesday with Schlumberger, the oil field services company, to advance the technology of carbon capture and sequestration.
But only a handful of small projects survive, and the recent cancellations mean that most of this work has come to a halt, raising doubts that the technique can be ready any time in the next few decades. And without it, “we’re not going to have much of a chance for stabilizing the climate,” said John Thompson, who oversees work on the issue for the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group.
I am 100% against this goofy idea. The earth is far from stable. Anything that is put into the ground eventually will come back topside as the earth shifts and shoves everything around. Not to mention meteorite strikes! So if we take this gas and then pump it into the ground, it won't vanish there. It is STORED there and will reenter the planetary system if disturbed. The chances of it being disturbed over time is 100%. Not 50% but absolutely certain.
Liquids can pour out and cause problems but they have to have somewhere to flow. They tend to sit wherever gravity has placed them. Gases, on the other hand, are hard to contain. They just want to bust out and spread as far as possible from each molecule next to the other. The imperative to do this is absolute. When we artificially trap gases and compress them into anything, the smallest pin hole puncture or itty bitty leak empties the compressed gas. Only a trace will be left. Anyone who handles gasses knows this and this is why tanks have to be carefully sealed and kept very safe and not thrown about. This is why you can't fill old tanks that look OK. They have to be replaced on a regular schedule.
Nature's timeline is near infinity. Ours is about six months into the future, if that. Any system devised to bottle up the genie of gas will fail and when this fails, 50 years of coal pollution will enter the planet's systems in less than a few days or even minutes? And this will do what? HOLY COW. It is obvious what happens next! It is far, far, far worse than gases building up slowly. We can't burn 500 million years of compressed biomatter in 50 years. We just cannot do it. Thus, the need for windmills, etc.
The 6.1 magnitude temblor struck about 3:46 p.m. (11:46 a.m. ET), according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Its epicenter was about 50 km (31 miles) east-southeast of the capital, Reykjavik, and was about 10 km (6.2 miles) below the Earth's surface.
It was unclear exactly how many people were injured or the severity of their injuries, Olli Tynes, a journalist with Reykjavik's Channel 2, told CNN.
The earth has been quieting down after the release of tension in the Chengdu region of China. That place is a basin which probably is caused by the land being squeezed between the Australian plate wrapping around southern Asia and the Eurasian plate to the north traveling eastwards. Perhaps the lithosphere in Chengdu is collapsing into the mantle. The length of the earthquake activity along the western edge of this basin makes this a real possibility. There was definite subsidence going on here.
Starting this week, the clusters of earth quakes have shifted to the opposite side of the planet. The Australian front has gone quite, relatively speaking. And the Chilean/Peru coast has seen a definite increase in earthquakes and volcanic activity. Then the Atlantic rift has been seeing a series of major earthquakes up and down the entire length. This, in turn, shoves both North and South America westards into all the plates under the Pacific Ocean.
This is increasing stresses in California/Oregon and Washington state.
When powerful earthquakes strike anywhere in the world, their seismic waves go rippling through the ground and trigger smaller quakes thousands of miles away where no one had ever expected them, scientists have discovered.
Geophysicists reported Sunday that they have studied records on the aftermath of 15 major quakes during the past 18 years and found evidence that they regularly caused small temblors on distant, obscure faults in 12 of those events.
But just what causes those clearly detectable smaller quakes in areas touched by seismic waves from far more powerful temblors remains an unsolved mystery, the scientists say.
Tom Parsons, a research geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, and his colleagues in Utah and Texas call the phenomenon dynamic triggering. They say the triggered temblors can occur even in stable ground where faults have long been inactive, as well as in volcanic ground and hot springs where the earth is always unstable.
What interests me most is the fact that the biggest quakes surrounding the basin/mountain complexes are most often at the 10 kilometer level. And the biggest quakes have a very strong likelihood of being at that level, too. The series of quakes these last four days in the Atlantic were all at that critical level, too. One wonders about this. It seems to me that there is a distinct difference in planetary materials between the 10 kilometer and the rest of the lithosphere.
Every earthquake sends many types of seismic waves coursing through the Earth - some deep within the Earth's crust and others across the surface. Two types of surface waves are known as Rayleigh and Love waves, and Pankow and Parsons focused on the impact of those.
The Rayleigh waves move the ground from side to side like a snake and cause most of the shaking in any earthquake, while Love waves move up and down as they travel, very much like waves on the ocean.
The researchers first examined the record of Love waves during the five hours after each of the 15 major quakes they studied, and calculated where and when small quakes would have been detected as those waves passed. The number of small quakes worldwide increased by 37 percent within each five-hour period, the scientists found. And when Rayleigh waves followed the Love waves, the number of small quakes triggered worldwide shot up by 60 percent, the group reported.
I hope to read this paper in full when it comes online. Since the earth is a whole entity, it pays to study these seemingly subtle effects. For this leads to understanding the obvious, bigger forces. Since our planet is mostly molten materials in the mantle and a dense core that is very, very hot, it pays to try to understand how shifts at the top, thin solid layers affect the molten parts. And of course, the energy of these earthquakes travel across this liquid mass.