Changes In Rocks Noted Before Earthquakes 48
Smivs writes with this snippet from an article at the BBC, well worth reading: "Scientists have made an
important advance in their efforts to predict earthquakes, the journal Nature says. A team of US researchers has detected stress-induced changes in rocks that occurred hours before two small tremors in California's San Andreas Fault. The observations used sensors lowered down holes drilled into the quake zone. The team says we are a long way from routine tremor forecasts but the latest findings hold out hope that such services might be possible one day."
That would make sense (Score:2)
It would make sense that just before an earthquake the rocks would start to stress, pull and break just before a cascading collapse.
The real question is how much would this system cost?
Yeah, it might save lives, but if an early detection system would cost an area a few hundred million, I'm guessing it won't happen.
Re:That would make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
They haven't developed an early warning system. They've just seen some changes in the rock prior to earthquakes which lead them to believe that it might be possible to develop a system of some sort that would provide early warning.
As the summary of the article says:
"The team says we are a long way from routine tremor forecasts but the latest findings hold out hope that such services might be possible one day."
Re:That would make sense (Score:5, Informative)
And yet the largest recorded quake in the Southeastern US [wikipedia.org] occurred right in the middle of a tectonic plate...
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"The earthquake is believed to have occurred on faults formed during the break-up of Pangea. Similar faults are found all along the east coast of North America."
Just because it was in the middle of a modern day tectonic plate, doesn't mean there were no faults there.
Re:That would make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, not anywhere on the ground, anyway. No earthquakes in space, though.
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holy shit, I am so gonna write that scifi novel!
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Heh, go for it.
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He probably meant plate boundary. The San Andreas fault represents the boundary between the Pacific and North American plates, and movement along plate boundaries [wikimedia.org] is both more common and of a usually higher magnitude than inner-plate fault movements.
It's a game of playing the statistics and risk, like anything else.
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The largest recorded quake in the middle of a tectonic plate occurred right in the middle of a tectonic plate? That's remarkable!
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The middle looks like it would be somewhere in way northern Canada or the Arctic Ocean, depending on how you define "middle" (center-of-mass, etc.)
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Re:That would make sense (Score:5, Informative)
They were drilling directionally with a 17" bit; that's a huge bit and it costs a lot of money. It's thousands of dollars for one. They used several bits to drill the hole.
Drilling directionally takes a lot longer to do for various reasons. The biggest reason was because they were drilling directly into a Granite formation. Granite is a hard, silica-rich, igneous rock. It does not break apart easily like Sandstone. It takes a long time to drill, when I was there, we were making between 5-10 feet/hour - at that rate, a 5000'-8000' deep hole takes a LONG time to drill, especially with the directional part factored in. And that Granite just chews up those big 17" bits, which means you have to replace them a lot.
Then you have to pay for the mud. The mud was a water-based system designed to lubricate the hole, keep it from collapsing, and use it to treat any problems. Like anything else, the longer they're producing mud, the more it costs. I've seen mud bills over a million dollars on one well before.
Then you have to pay all the people on location. The Company Man, sort of the Foreman of a location, costs at least 2000-4000 dollars every day he's out there. You have to pay the Roughnecks every day they're out there to drill, the mud engineers, geologists, safety guys, etc. And since this was a far more scientifically oriented job than most wells drilled, there was a lot of other cool stuff and personnel that had to be paid.
In the end, we're talking millions of dollars. Millions and millions. I don't really have an exact price to tell you, I was just a contractor on part of the job. But it was a really long job, I feel safe guessing at least 10 million dollars.
And that's just for one hole. If you can streamline the process and figure out where delays happened and if you can fix those delays on the next job, you'll be able to do subsequent wells cheaper.
PC case mod with a dremel tool (Score:2)
*Disclaimer* I live in Oklahoma - I feel your pain, You are preaching to the unaware and clueless sectors here.
The average /.'er has no clue what is involved with with what it takes to get an oilfield 'online'., much less the economics involved.
I have several pumping stations on my property and it is frustrating to 'clue in' the rest of the country in what's involved to get a station 'online'(ie:getting oil out of the ground and to 'something useful')
The whole 'get some money now, and fsck you' and fsck the
Re:That would make sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Think of the bigger picture man! Millions of dollars in damage could be saved from such a predictive system. A few obvious examples are:
Any major industrial process that handles dangerous materials - Hello refineries, Natural Gas Providers...
Museums and Private owners - art and sculptures could be saved
And the poor china-shop owners!
Fires that result from earthquakes can increase the damages from the quake significantly. By having early warning, measures could be taken to avoid these fires entirely.
Take it from a Californian, we'd really like to know beforehand!
Re:That would make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
In our sue-happy society, the company or oganization who piloted a system like this would be sued off the face of the planet if they missed one decent quake.
Re:That would make sense (Score:4, Insightful)
And here in New Orleans we'd love to have some better levees which could've saved us from billions of dollars worth of flood damage. Unfortunately for both of us, the powers that be aren't particularly interested in sacrificing now for the sake of later.
By "powers that be," you must mean... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately for both of us, the powers that be aren't particularly interested in sacrificing now for the sake of later.
a.k.a. The voters -- especially those who are all about tax cuts.
stop waiting (Score:1, Interesting)
Impose a local surtax, a buck a drink and a buck a plate of food, goes directly to levee repair and reinforcement, and try not to make it top heavy with handling fees and management and governing the money, get it to the engineers and workers who can do the work. Route around the stoopid feds, they have proven to be at best only half way effective, every single time, no matter the situation. The problem is in that cesspool of failure called DC and how money gets allocated, so try and divorce yourself from D
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Fuck your levees, build ABOVE sea level. That could have saved you from billions worth of flood damage. 'Cause we always done it this way' is not a defensible excuse.
Ask your state on how God should have prevented this [slashdot.org].
Maybe your god foresaw this shit and was giving you a 'heads up' with Katrina. Get a clue!
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More than 50% of New Orleans is above sea level, including many of the parts that flooded. You know nothing about which you speak.
And thanks for linking it to the ridiculous ID nonsense that is entirely irrelevant. NOLA is one of the most liberal cities in the USA, it had nothing to do with that.
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Then why the national cry for help?
As far as the ID nonsense you speak of, reply to your own lawmakers about this load of crap, not me. They are the ones that passed this turd into law.
NOLA? get the news for the rest of your state. it has nothing to do with me or the rest of the country- get a clue.
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Uhhhhhhhhh... How Exactly?
You can't avoid the fire. Buildings can't move. People Can. You can't vent the gas in all the pipe lines either, which would seem to be of primary concern. You would spend millions and millions of dollars trying to vent gas into the atmosphere, which has its own unavoidable complications. Fires happen when gas l
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Shut off the gas. Fire averted.
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That was my point. That does not work. There is gas in the lines. Shutting off the gas does not make the gas magically disappear.
Those fires happen when the lines themselves get cut.
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Well, you would have to shut it off well upstream. How far ahead do you cut off everyone's gas? How much warning to how far ahead do you give industrial customers that can't have it cut in the middle of processing? Cutting it off far enough upstream to do any good means cutting it off to hospitals etc also. What if there a gas burning power plants nearby, do you cut that and peoples electricity also?
For that matter shouldn't you turn off the power so it can't ignite the fires?
Now that you turned off everyon
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Who knows what 'this system will cost'?
From TFA: "The team says we are a long way from routine tremor forecasts but the latest findings hold out hope that such services might be possible one day."
When 'one day' happens then ask your asinine question.
That's one of the problems with today's society: when INSTANT gratification is not fast enough.
*stupid git*
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system costs 20 million (Score:2)
Duh! (Score:5, Funny)
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Not good (Score:5, Funny)
Rock-paper-scissors is ruined if you can predict rock. Neither player will ever use it, so no one will use paper either. You'll be left doing scissors over and over forever.
Wait, oh, nevermind.
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From the Seinfeld episode "The Stand-In":
"Rock paper scissors match." - Mickey
"Alright! Rock beats paper!" - Kramer
"I thought paper covered rock." - Mickey
"Nah, rock flys right through paper." - Kramer
"Well, what beats rock?" - Mickey
"Nothing beats rock." - Kramer
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Just use cockroach, shoe, nuclear bomb.
shoe beats cockroach, nuclear bomb beats the shoe, but the cockroach beats the nuclear bomb.
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steel iron does many things in changes. why choose granite to drill as predictor?
A wild stab in the dark : because granite is made of quartz which is notorious for its piezoelectric properties and these characteristics would be affected by the changes this article is talking about?
Just like fusion (Score:2)
Just like fusion - earthquake prediction is always fifty years away.
It's nothing new (Score:1)
Rock hot = Sunny
Rock wet = Rain
Rock gone = Hurricane
Rock shake = Earthquake
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It's called post-prediction. We have all the techniques we need for that, thank you.
More interest in this please (Score:2)
Interesting, and considered the stakes and how few of such methods have had any sort of success, I wish people (governments/universities) would spend more money on that sort of research.
I'm thinking in particular of this technique [wikipedia.org] that relies on electrotelluric signals to predict earthquakes a few hours before they occur. It's been a controversial technique ever since it appeared in the 1980s, and that's the problem, it's controversial. If we had put more effort into investigating such possibilities we woul