Spanish quake linked to groundwater pumping

[xchrom]

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/345937/description/Spanish_quake_linked_to_groundwater_pumping

Farmers and other residents pumping groundwater from Earth’s crust probably triggered an earthquake that killed nine people last year in southeastern Spain, scientists have found.

Sucking up water for decades would have unloaded stresses within the ground and hastened a quake that was likely to happen anyway, says Pablo González, a geologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada.

“Even without the groundwater extraction, the earthquake was overdue,” he says. But human activities provided “a kind of triggering or controlling.”

González and his colleagues report the discovery online October 21 in Nature Geoscience

[hollysmom]

1. Doesn't this remind you of old sci fi stories

where deep drilling cause the mantle to crack and the earth went spinning off in pieces?