Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Last blogged @ 9:40 AM

5 Top Ways To Cause Man-Made Disasters

 " In the past, people never thought that human activity could have such a big impact, but it can, " said Christian Klose, a geohazards researcher at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.




Back in 2005, a geologist claimed that the world's then-tallest building, Taipei 101, which weighs in at more than 700 700 metric tons, was triggering Earthquakes in a long-dormant fault in Taiwan.




Water is heavier than air, so when the valley behind the dam is filled, the crust underneath the water experiences a massive change in stress load. For example, the Hoover Dam area experienced hundreds of quakes as Lake Mead filled. Klose's research also indicates that one-third of human-caused Earthquakes came from reservoir construction.



Three of the largest human-caused Earthquakes occurred near a natural-gas field in Uzbekistan, the Gazli. Combination of liquid extraction and injection changed the tectonic action in the field. The biggest of the trio was registered as a 7.3. It was also caution that in regions where tectonic activity is already high, extracting oil and natural gas could trigger strong quakes.




In 1961, the army decided that the best way to dispose of toxic waste from Napalm production ( among other things ) was to drill a 12 000-foot-deep well in the Rocky Mountain and inject the bad stuffs down into the crust of the Earth. From 1962 to 1966, the army deposited 165million gallons of toxic waste into this hole. Unfortunately, the injections probably triggered the Earthquakes in the region and the army shut the operation down. This is so as the deep well injection are altering the stress on the underlying rocks and at some point, the stress will be relieved by generating an Earthquake.



Coal provides more than half the electricity in the US and an even greater percentage in China. Therefore,there are a lot of coal mines working overtime to pull the fossilized fuel out of the Earth.Coal mines often have to pump water out along with the coal, sometimes extracting dozens of times as much water as coal. This then result in a huge change in mass, stressing the area which increase the chances for an Earthquake to strike in.
Eg, There are miners in Virginia that are in the coal mine, trapped. This news has then became National.Does this shows that mines shouldnt be used?