The plan to set off earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault

Published this week a story in the VCReporter on fracking and earthquakes. Much of this story is specific to Ventura County, but the opening I think is pretty darn universal. (Certainly for Californians it's memorable.) Think it's almost a "once upon a time" story, although of a scientific sort. 

From the days when we thought engineering, and geoengineering, could solve all our problems. 

The U.S. Army had a problem, a big problem: 165,000 gallons of some of the deadliest war materials known to man, including napalm, chlorine gas, mustard gas and sarin, a nerve gas developed by the Nazis, tiny doses of which can kill in minutes. After stockpiling these weapons of destruction for decades in its Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, the government decided the time had come to dispose of the hazardous wastes but didn’t know how.

The solution? In l961, authorities drilled a well 12,000 feet deep, far below any aquifer, and over the next five years pumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic wastes into a cavity in the rock miles beneath the surface.

One problem: Not long after the pumping began, Denver and nearby suburbs began to experience swarms of earthquakes. Most of them were quite small, less than 3 in magnitude, but in a region that rarely experiences earthquakes, 1,300 earthquakes in four years raised questions. Then, in August 1967, a significant earthquake — magnitude 5.3 — shook the city of Denver and the nearby suburb of Commerce, with damages that totaled over $1 million.

The Army stopped pumping the toxic wastes into the injection well. Geologists discovered the liquids had been pumped into an existing fault deep in the “basement” rock. The fault had begun to lose strength and slip, even after the pumping stopped. 

For city officials, this was alarming, but geologists were intrigued to discover it was possible to trigger earthquakes along existing fault lines, and a team of scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey soon launched into an experiment in an oil field with known earthquake faults in Rangely, Colo. The goal? To learn what volume of fluid pressures were required to trigger earthquakes, and to see if seismic activity could be stimulated and then brought to a halt. The experiment worked, on a small scale, and encouraging results were reported in the journal Science in March of 1976.

“We may ultimately be able to control the timing and size of major earthquakes,” the team, led by C.B. Raleigh and J.H. Healy, speculated. They suggested drilling wells along the San Andreas Fault, and injecting water to release seismic pressures with little earthquakes. They hoped in this way to prevent the legendary “Big One,” an earthquake comparable to the massive and ruinous l906 San Francisco earthquake, which has a 3 percent to 30 percent chance of occurring in the next 30 years in California.

 “They actually proposed this idea, to drill wells and pump in water and trigger small earthquakes along the San Andreas,” said William Bilodeau, who chairs the geology department at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. “And they got fairly far along in the planning process and then people began to say, ‘Wait a minute — what happens if we set off a really big earthquake? What’s the [legal] liability?’ ”

Bigonecover

Californians: Not so dumb after all

California's electrical use vs. the rest of the country, per capita:

California-electricity-use-per-capita
[chart from the US Energy Information Administration]

Most analysts credit the state's aggressive push for green energy, insulation, and the other efficiency measures. After all, the state has some of the highest prices in the country. But some wonks disagree. 

Don't they always? 

When agencies attack: Interior vs. State on Keystone XL

As another excellent story from Neela Banerjee in the Los Angeles Times makes clear, w the Department of Interior thinks the State Department is just ignoring its concerns on wildlife issues on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project.

Reading only slightly between the lines, Interior looked at State's "it's not going to be a problem" report on Keystone XL and, like the EPA six months ago, calls bullshit.  

In a letter, the Department of the Interior what State can do with its report, to improve it:

Likewise, we recommend that sections 4.1 through 4.6.3.5 be revised and reorganized to address the direct and indirect impacts for individual major scientific taxa, and subdivisions of taxa. For example, provide separate sections that discuss environmental consequences of the project on invertebrates, birds, reptiles and amphibians, and large and small mammals. For birds, distinct subcategories might include waterfowl, waterbirds, passerines, raptors, etc. Explain the mitigation measures for each respective taxa, and for the subdivisions of taxa.

Telling the State Department to explain itself, as if it were a child! How often does that happen? 

Interior sent State this letter back in April, as part of the public comments process. For some crazy reason State didn't post it until yesterday. 


Stopkeystone

Los Angeles: Soon to be a walker’s paradise?

It's not true, as a Missing Person used to shriek back in l982, that nobody walks in L.A. In 2013, lots of people walk in L.A. For fun and exercise. Heck, Los Angeles could be "a walker's paradise!"

Well, hasn't happened yet, but it actually could, and walking itself has become cool. In the nick of time. It began not with a promotion, not with a celebrity, not with Michael Moore, but with the realization that "sitting is the new smoking." In a TED talk, allegedly.

From a story in today's NYTimes:

This always sounds absurd to New Yorkers, but many Angelenos would sooner have their mug shots appear on TMZ than go a few steps without a motor vehicle. Here, we drive ourselves to jog, to bike, to attend spin class and to hike, and it’s not unusual for a dinner gathering of three couples to involve five or six cars. All of which contributes to how much we sit. When we are not sitting on the freeways, we are sitting at our computers, in meetings, at restaurants or in front of the TV. And by we, in this case I mean me, at least until recently.

At this year’s TED conference, the author and the Silicon Valley corporate executive Nilofer Merchant delivered a three-minute talk that scared the life out of me about how sitting has become the smoking of our generation. It arrived on the heels of a Harvard Business Review article she wrote that said Americans average 9.3 hours of sitting a day, compared to 7.7 hours of sleeping. So elemental is sitting to our daily routine, we don’t even think about it, and yet it’s killing us.

Just one hour of sitting slows production of fat-burning enzymes by as much as 90 percent, she said, and a longer term habit (you might want to sit down for this) negatively affects good cholesterol levels and increases the risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and certain kinds of cancer.

[snip]

Ms. Merchant’s prescription is to just keep moving. Walk with friends instead of stuffing your faces at meals. Walk to any destination within a mile radius of your home or business. Consider a standing desk (Ikea sells components to hack one for under $150) or even a treadmill desk, a kind of turbo work station that allows you to waste time on Facebook, but at an invigorating 2 m.p.h.

Naturally, Hollywood is all over it. “The actor Jerry O’Connell was in here the other day and said, ‘You’re the fittest screenwriter I’ve ever seen,’ “ said Janet Tamaro, who created “Rizzoli & Isles” and sometimes spends 10 straight hours walking through rewrites (many days her pedometer registers 50,000 steps). “I said, ‘Well, thanks, but that bar is pretty low.’ “

From a great NYTimes story by free-lance hero David Hochman. The city really does have great stairs in some hilly neighborhoods, known only to locals, leafy and quiet and quick. Charming. 

Stairsoflosangeles

from an Adventure Los Angeles: Secret Stairs

Wildlife Conservation: Huge owls need huge trees

Sometimes news about wildlife and habitat isn't surprising, but worth resposting anyhow, for its own sake, just as species are worth saving for their own sake.

Here's an example, a news release today from the Wildlife Conservation Society:

A study spearheaded by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of Minnesota has shown that the world's largest owl — and one of the rarest — is also a key indicator of the health of some of the last great primary forests of Russia's Far East.

The study found that Blakiston's fish owl relies on old-growth forests along streams for both breeding and to support healthy populations of their favorite prey: salmon. The large trees provide breeding cavities for the enormous bird, which has a two-meter (six-foot) wingspan. And when these dead, massive trees topple into adjacent streams, they disrupt water flow, forcing the gushing river around, over, and under these new obstacles. The result is stream channel complexity: a combination of deep, slow-moving backwaters and shallow, fast-moving channels that provide important microhabitats critical to salmon in different developmental stages.

[snip]

"Blakiston's fish owl is a clear indicator of the health of the forests, rivers, and salmon populations," said lead author Jonathan Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society. "Retention of habitat for fish owls will also maintain habitat for many other species associated with riparian old-growth forests in the Russian Far East."

Partly it's worth posting for this wonderful pic of the researcher Slaught and a Blakiston fish owl. 

Blakistonfishowl

Via a conservation site, White Wolf Pack.

Meet the heat: 21st century to be hot, hotter, and hottest

From a new set of projections in Environmental Research Letters:

"Climate change is set to trigger more frequent and severe heat waves in the next 30 years regardless of the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) we emit into the atmosphere, a new study has shown.

Extreme heat waves such as those that hit the US in 2012 and Australia in 2009 — dubbed three-sigma events by the researchers — are projected to cover double the amount of global land by 2020 and quadruple by 2040.

Meanwhile, more-severe summer heat waves — classified as five-sigma events — will go from being essentially absent in the present day to covering around three per cent of the global land surface by 2040.

The new study, which has been published today, Thursday 15 August, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, finds that in the first half of the 21st century, these projections will occur regardless of the amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.

After then, the rise in frequency of extreme heat waves becomes dependent on the emission scenario adopted. Under a low emission scenario, the number of extremes will stabilise by 2040, whereas under a high emission scenario, the land area affected by extremes will increase by one per cent a year after 2040."

The tropics and the Mediterranean are expected to be the hardest hit, write authors Dim Coumou and Alexander Robinson. We are locked in to a major increase in heat events to 2040, regardless of what we do with emissions, but if we fail to restrain emissions, the post-2040 future will be horrific.

This is a graphic showing the projected rise in 3 and 5-sigma [standard deviation] heat events, the box at the left for the last few decades, and the two at the right showing projections (with the black line showing observations to date). Note the difference post 2040 is dependent on emission scenarios [click to enlarge]. The authors warn of the risks of inaction:

Unmitigated climate change causes most (>50%) continental regions to move to a new climatic regime with the coldest summer months by the end of the century substantially hotter than the hottest experienced today.

Sigma events

 

The Cheyenne vs. the white man’s theory of tornadoes

A spectacular NYTimes magazine story on Oklahoma's "weather god" of tornadoes, meteorologist and television forecaster Gary England, included this fascinating nugget from writer Sam Anderson:

 I kept remembering something Gary England told me in his office. One big regret, he said, is that although he grew up surrounded by Cheyenne people in Seiling, he never asked them about tornadoes. He didn’t know any of the tribes’ severe-weather folklore or survival strategies — the wisdom they must have built up over centuries on the Plains. Greg Carbin, at the National Weather Service, told me something similar. It’s a shame, he said, but not much native lore has survived. Both men had an attitude of sad resignation. Despite all of our Dopplers and Storm Trackers and Dominators, the feeling seemed to be, we have lost the old wisdom forever.

As I combed through the meteorological data about the tornadoes of May 31, this loss kept cycling through my mind. Eventually, in mid-July, after Oklahoma’s tornado season had given way to suffocating summer heat, I e-mailed the Cheyenne Nation and got in touch with a chief named Gordon Yellowman. Yellowman wouldn’t tell me everything he knows about surviving tornadoes. The rituals are sacred, he said, and have never been shared with outsiders. But he did tell me some things.

The Cheyenne language has several words for tornadoes and their related storms:hevovetaso (tornado), ma’xehevovetaso (big  whirlwind), ehohaatamano’e (threatening weather). For the Cheyenne, the tornado is not some kind of evil predatory force or a random assault from a blind and dumb atmospheric soup with no concern for human life. A tornado has a job, Yellowman told me, and that is to restore balance to the environment. The tornado speaks to the native people, in their respective tribal languages, in a voice that sounds like fire. Before it reaches the tribal land, the tornado tells the elders how big it’s going to be, not in the technical language of the EF scale but in colloquial terms: small, medium, big, huge. The tornado of May 31 was huge.

Yellowman is 55 and lives in El Reno. Late on the afternoon of May 31, as the EF5 was bearing down on his city, he and four other Cheyenne holy men stood in their homes and enacted the ancient rituals. They spoke with the tornado. They asked it to have pity and turn away.

This, Yellowman said, was when, against all meteorological expectation, the tornado turned south — baffling Gary England, breaking Emily Sutton’s windshield, tossing the Weather Channel car, mangling the Dominator. It was later determined that the El Reno tornado was 2.6 miles wide — the widest in recorded history.

Meterologists measure tornadoes by their destructive potential, from E1 to E5. Here's a spooky Nat'l Geographic video of a tornado chaser:

 

 

I

Note how thrilled researcher Tim Samaras is to see that storm. I get that, and personally would like to experience a hurricane. We speak of the "awesome" — what could be more awesome than a hurricane?

The l970’s in one image: Tripper

At the National Archives is a selection of a jaw-dropping collection of photos of the l970's courtesy of, believe it or not, the Environmental Protection Agency.

Yes, inspired by the famous WPA Farm Security Administration project, the EPA hired veteran photographers to document the agency, the nation, and the times, in the Documerica project (l971-1977).

According to a show of some of those images at the National Archives, this is the single most iconic of the thousands of photographs they produced — a hitchhiker with his dog. 

Tripperdocumerica

Here's the caption, from photographer Charles O'Rear:

"Hitchhiker with his dog, "Tripper", on U.S. 66. U.S. 66 crosses the Colorado River at Topock, May 1972"

Wonder if that barefoot hitchhiker is still around, and if so, where he is now. 

“The wets will get wetter, the dries drier” for New York City

In the climatologists at work file, here's Dorothy Peteet exploring a marsh about twenty miles north of New York City, taking core samples from the past to extract pollen records, and discovering that during the Medieval Warm Period, what eventually become NYC endured a 500-year drought. 

Peteet is on the hunt for pollen. She dredges up mud from as deep as 45 feet underground and hauls it back to her lab at the nearby Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. There she boils, bakes, and filters it to sift out pollen, not much thicker than a human hair, from plants several thousand years old. The relative abundance and variety of different species indicate climate conditions at the time the pollen was dropped: An uptick of dry-weather species like hickory and pine points to drought.

[snip]

In 2005, Peteet unearthed evidence of a 500-year-long drought that baked the New York City region from 800 to 1300 A.D., a time known as the Medieval Warming Period (because this ancient warming happened in an age before human greenhouse gas emissions, it’s become a favorite reference of climate skeptics; however, today’s temperatures are even warmer than then, and recent science indicates that the Medieval warming was driven by higher-than-normal solar radiation and lower-than-normal volcanic activity. It was also concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, unlike contemporary global warming, which is worldwide).

[snip]

“What is it going to be like if we have a 500 year drought?” Peteet says. Piecing together the pollen record, she says, can help establish patterns that policymakers and the public could draw on to better anticipate what the future will hold. As it stands, climate scientists think New York is in for hotter and wetter conditions, which, meteorologist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research explains, can, somewhat counterintuitively, lead to more droughts. Precipitation is expected to increase, but it will happen in a series of severe downpours interspersed with dry spells; warmer temperatures in these dry spells can prolong them and increase the risk of drought.

Fracking in NYC has been controversial in large part because Manhattanites are nervous about their water supply: perhaps they should be asking how well they are equipped for a long-term drought. 

Climatologistsatwork

From the ever-industrious Climate Desk.