• 33 Days Ago
• 01/20/2012

Hidden Geological Structures

But Stewart says induced quakes are rare events because well operators deliberately avoid drilling near known faults. 

Ok, how about Asteroid Impact craters?

41.100,-81.019  50 miles in diameter Youngstown Ohio probability >50%
Earthquakes, Visible Surface Features. Drilling or actually looking at the well logs for impact features like edge uplift,  an impact ejecta blanket and missing geological strata. Don't fall for the gold standard  fractured/sheared quartz since that is only a small part of the affected material and it is often eroded or very difficult to get to.

So you say no one could hide a 50 Mile wide Impact Crater.

New Madrid, Missouri appears to be the center of an 800 MILE diameter impact crater.

(See USS Gravity usgv.gif)  http://research.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=37229

When the Appalachian Mountains were shoved into the continent, part of the crater got squished (southeast side). After the Ragnarök impact, the Sun may not have been visible for months, and the glaciers would advance for thousands of years. This was the last act of the Devonian.

It was also a significant Extinction Level Event E.L.E. Property values plummeted.

The North American NAM Craton (Continent) had been shattered by the impact of the asteroid or comet (Google Mid-Continent Rift probably was reactivated), so it may be an unstable, cobbled together, continental core. The powers that be have had the estimated strength of the 1800's New Madrid earthquakes revised steadily downward. I guess you can put those cheap non-earthquake building codes on hold now.

The Californian fault lines are much better understood and modeled. The Ragnarök/New Madrid impact crater will be harder to figure out. It is going to take the Geologist a while to pull their fingers out of their ears and to quit chanting impact craters don't exist. One of the benefits of Oil Company sponsored academic chairs is controlling the standard model, and the standard model does not include impact craters. At least not publicly disclosed impact craters.

Add the people living in the Ragnarok/New Madrid fractured continent zone as potential victims  endangered by the SECRETS THAT THE OIL AND GAS COMPANIES KEPT.

Money can cover a whole lot of ugly. It gets worse.

How many impact craters can you name? To assess the danger of a threat you need to know how often it can happen. Because impact craters are being actively hidden, we do not have an accurate count of the impact craters or an accurate assessment of the impact rate. Remote calculation like examining the moon to figure out the impact rate is very inaccurate and may miss important short term cyclical patterns. An impact crater on Earth can have its age determined with high accuracy. Number of craters over a set period of time will give you the rate of impact.

• 33 Days Ago
• 01/20/2012

Oklahoma Earthquakes

In November of 2011 there were a lot of Earthquakes in Oklahoma. One of my hobbies is geology and I was getting tired of the "official cover up the gas fracking story". Plus the earthquakes were getting really annoying. Oklahoma media is a sock puppet of the Oil and Gas companies.

Meeker Crater Approx. 13.5 miles in diameter. 35.557N, -96.871W Fracking this crater created the Oklahoma Earthquakes. 67 Earthquakes inside this 13.5 mile diameter structure since Feb 2010. Including a record breaking 5.6 and two 4.8's. This structure also shows up on the well logs. Some logs list boulders at a distance from the impact. One mentions encountering IRON,  not iron pyrite. Ejecta blankets and smeared strata can be followed on the well logs.

http://www.geocommunicator.gov/blmMap/MapLSIS.jsp Better images than Google, Google uses a patchwork of images taken at different times. This makes it harder to pick out big structures because the patchwork of images from different seasons breaks up any silhouette.

Use this link to find the Earthquakes that happened near or in an impact crater.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/epic/epic_circ.php
The radius is in kilometers so divide the miles by 1.6 .      Miles/1.6 =  Kilometers
Meeker Crater ----Center Latitude 35.557 Longitude NEG -96.871 radius in km  11.0 Leave other inputs blank.

Use the spreadsheet output format, the map function is a bad joke, it is intentionally useless so that it won't help you spot any patterns. Individuals within government agencies, (possibly the USGS), helped hide these asteroid impact craters from the general public. 

So now the oil companies secret has become a direct threat to public safety.

Oh yeah I almost forgot, the impact layer is radioactive, and they want to frack it. The asteroid (or comet) deposited millions of tons of radioactive materials into the layers that they want to frack. It is still (sort of) naturally occurring, if you don't mention the Asteroid Impacts. Naturally occurring radioactive layers that were probably isolated from the environment until the oil companies drilled into them. Had the public known about the impact craters, and that they were  radioactive, would the public have allowed those pools to be produced? Would the "Naturally Occurring Radiation" NORM in the Oklahoma and Texas water supplies be there, if the oil companies had been stopped from producing these radioactive fields?

And the government is silent. Paid to be seen and not heard.

Got Crypto-Explosion Volcanoes? One of the geological euphemisms for craters.

Another is Orogeny  a distinct geological area gets uplifted, eroded, immediately subsides,  and then gets filled in with fractured debris and collapse breccia.

That is the usual cover for an impact. Obviously just having a rock smash a hole in the ground is too simple.

• 33 Days Ago
• 01/20/2012

Drilling Related Earthquakes

In my opinion the author of this article is confusing fracking with other industry related problems. The Ohio well in question is an intake well to dispose of brine solution. The well was originally fracked with no problems. But the inputing of brine into the well has caused problems. There are thousands of brine disposal wells in the country which have caused no problems.

Drilling related activities have led to earthquakes. The New York Times reported in 2009 that in Basel, Switzerland, a geo thermal well was drilled three miles (4.8 kilometers) into Earth's crust, setting off a magnitude 3.4 earthquake, rocking the town and shutting the operation down entirely. Geo thermal drilling in California is leading to the same local earthquake issues.

Fracking has been around for 60 years. I don't think it is unreasonable to have had the author learn what it entails before writing an article blaming this well issues on fracking.

• 30 Days Ago
• 01/23/2012

Small quakes de-energize big ones?

Wouldn't you think that the small quakes would release some of the potential energy stored in compressed rock by plate tectonics? So don't they reduce the magnitude of a subsequent natural quake?

• 30 Days Ago
• 01/23/2012

Basins, is that the same as a massive excavated impact crater? Why don't the continents on Earth look like the Moon, blasted by craters. It is called sedimentary rock. Think of it as makeup, applied with a trowel.

What is visible on the surface of Meeker Crater , is probably not the actual impact crater. We may be seeing the long term effects of faulting on the rocks which formed above the structure.  As the sedimentary rock layers formed above the structure, they would develop faults as the structure settled. These faults would tend to erode more quickly then adjacent areas, We are probably just seeing the surface shadow of the impact craters which are still buried thousands of feet below.  

The craters are still here. A small number of scientists and oil companies are discouraging any identification of any impact structures. The scientists are creating the authoritative but flimsy excuses to hide these structures as anything but impact structures. So how would the chamber of Commerce of New Madrid respond to the publicity that they were ground zero for a massive impact?

Look up Uranium in Some Rocks.... Geological Survey 1147-B. Look up the black shales like
Bakken Shale, Hangenberg shale, Marcellus Shale, Chattanooga Shale, and the Woodford Shale.
All of them have increased levels of uranium and rare earth elements REE's. 

I wonder who funded the studies the argued for a purely biological effect to account for all of theses metals being concentrated in the black shales? By their arguments seawater must be the best uranium ore on the planet. Science funding is very effective propaganda. Ask the Koch's (shut up and drink your formaldehyde , it is good for you Koch's) about how effective funding scientific propaganda can be.

And why all the different names for the shales? I believe that most of them were deposited at the same time. They are all deposited in basins after a really bad bout of orogeny. Or would that be too obvious to look at a map and connect all the basins?

Too often I find reading modern geological papers is an exercise in reversing Occam's razor. Instead of a simple narrative like a big rock came down and smashed a big hole, they do this: A distinct geological feature gets uplifted, eroded, then immediately subsides, which then gets filled in with fractured debris and collapse breccia.  The collapse breccia is a nice touch, so when you see the IMPACT breccia you would think that the entire region had caves collapsing and forming massive breccia formations.

Why couldn't New Madrid be the center of a 800+ mile wide impact crater that ended the Devonian period?  If the impact was on land, it should still be here!

And fracking an impact crater like the Meeker Crater will cause earthquakes. Instead of strong connected strata you have a bowl shaped structure ringed with fractured rock. The bowl could be thought of as a short stroke hydraulic piston. Hydraulic fracking of a hydraulic piston, simple eh?


"Oh yeah I almost forgot, the impact layer is radioactive"

Excuse my dark sense of humor but the level of corruption and deceit is comical, since what they are hiding is so large.

• 28 Days Ago
• 01/25/2012

800 Pound Gorilla

Very fascinating article and comments, but somehow everyone is ignoring the fundamental issue.  We are faced with a global disaster caused primarily by burning fossil carbon.  No matter what source can be developed, there are only relative terms for haw bad they all are for the planet.  The Tar Sands project hits bottom, and that level of bad is "insane".  Fracking is close, (although the fuel is the least polluting in terms of CO2), partly because of another problem I do not see mentioned, which is contamination of fresh water aquifers.  

All of the money being invested in Fracking and other carbon sources must be redirected into building non-polluting power generation.  The environmental cost of continuing to use fossil Carbon as fuel is so enormous it is hard to calculate.  How do you add up the value of every coastal city, all land that will be inundated by even ten to twenty feet of ocean rise?  And then you need to add in the cost of loss of fresh water in Chile, China, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, etc, where glaciers are not being regenerated - where drought will cause the death or forced migration of millions of people.  Hard to calculate, but the conclusion is obvious - if we will just look at the inevitable problems that burning fossil carbon is causing.  There is no way to justify what we call "profit" from these industries.  There is no profit, there is only a lemming like rush toward disaster.  Apparently the problem is so vast and the need to redirect all power investment is so big a turn from our habitual use of "easy energy" that denial has become unquestioned.  Mental and social inertia has frozen our minds.  We do not see the 800 pound gorilla sitting at the table.  This article and discussion is typical.  Every possible detail is discussed, and the conversation is fascinating - but it is carried out as if the gorilla simply does not exist. 

Fortunately, there are alternatives.  We must decide that all of the money being invested in fracking, for example, will be more secure and will avoid ccausing disasters if it is invested in any one of several available non-polluting technologies.

First, the panic about the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters must be put in perspective.  Those events do not "Prove" that Nuclear Energy is dangerous, they just prove that badly designed and absurdly located reactors are dangerous.  Modern Reactor design is extremely safe, and designs are available that use existing stockpiles of "nuclear waste" as fuel, reducing the unusable radioactive material to a small amount with a relatively short half-life.  Designs are available to use Thorium as fuel, which gives us energy for a long time.  Nuclear reactors can come on line quickly and provide base-line power to replace coal first.  No new coal burning plants need to be built, and must not be built, since that is the most polluting carbon in common use. 

An excellent design of Solar-Wind tower generator is being built in Arizona.  That design needs to be used everywhere appropriate, such as desert areas in China and Africa.  It is usable for base-line power since it runs at night with stored heat energy.

Joule Unlimited appears to have a good process for making liquid fuels for transportation.

If we want to enjoy some small earthquakes with our energy, at least geothermal plants use no carbon fuel, and new technology allows them to be built in many locations.

The point is that we MUST stop burning fossil carbon in any form.  The danger to the planet must be recognized.  That is the reason we must change to nonpolluting energy.  We would be totally derelict in our responsibility to future generations by continuing to use this inevitably destructive fuel.  We can not replace the Earth, so we must stop damaging it.