Top 5 Ways to Cause a Man-Made Earthquake

[Dover]

In the first Superman movie, supervillain Lex Luthor plans to trigger a massive, California-detaching earthquake by detonating a couple of nuclear weapons in the San Andreas Fault.

Crazy Lex! That scheme never would have worked, geologists will tell you. But, if he'd been serious about creating an earthquake, there are ways he could have actually done it. He would just have to inject some liquid (as some carbon-sequestration schemes propose) deep into the Earth's crust, or bore a few hundred thousand tons of coal out of a mountain.

"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.

It turns out, actually, that the human production of earthquakes is hardly supervillain-worthy. It's downright commonplace: Klose estimates that 25 percent of Britain's recorded seismic events were caused by people.

Most of these human-caused quakes are tiny, registering less than four on geologist's seismic scales. These window-rattlers don't occur along natural faults, and wouldn't have happened without human activity -- like mining tons of coal or potash. They occur when a mine's roof collapses, for example, as in the Crandall Canyon collapse in Utah that killed a half-dozen miners last year.


But some human actions can trigger much larger quakes along natural fault lines. That's because humans, with the aid of our massive machines, can sling enough mass around to shift the pattern of stresses in the Earth's crust. Faults that might not have caused an earthquake for a million years can suddenly be pushed to failure, as Klose argues occurred during Australia's only fatal earthquake in 1989...cont'd


http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/top-5-ways-that.html

[dysfunctional press]

1. if it were true that earthquakes could be spawned by man-made changes to the landscape...

why don't things like days of drenching rain or extremely deep snowpacks trigger them? i would imagine that in california or japan or wherever- when you have heavy rains over a wide area the earth above the fault lines is A LOT heavier than when it's dry.

although i do believe in man-caused climate change, i have a hard time believing that human activity can spawn too many earthquakes.

[TheMadMonk]

2. Yes/No

Events such as you describe have a certain dynamic equilibrium. They are repetitive events.

Taking the top off an entire mountain range in West Virginia introduces entirely novel stresses on the surrounding geology.

[Arctic Dave]

3. Dover, you are totaly rockin this party tonight with the science post.

I am enjoying them all.

[freeplessinseattle]

4. heard that the Kama Sutra done properly

can make the earth move:)

[losthills]

5. A lot of people think some heavey shit is going to happen

when enough weight is removed from the poles from melting ice packs.