Let's play, "Scientist Says!!!!!"
The article discussed in this (very stupid) diary comes from the prestigious scientific journal Nature and was published in the August 2001 issue, Vol. 412, pp. 812-815. The authors are Gerald W. Bawden*, Wayne Thatcher*, Ross S. Stein*, Ken W. Hudnut² Gilles Peltzer³ and they work for the USGS, and UCLA.
If you have been to the South Bay area of LA, you realize that there are lots of oil wells in the basin, in the parking lots of Toys R Us, in empty lots, even in people's backyards.
There has been some talk of "sequestering" carbon dioxide in some fields in the area, around the Carson area, but actually this is not really "sequestration" so much as a scheme to push the last ounce of dangerous fossil fuels out of the wells. The Carson oil fields run south through Lomita and into Wilmington, and several major refineries are located in the area, which is characterized by pretty dangerous faults and dangerous cracking catalysts - at one time lots of hydrofluoric acid, which makes pretty nasty burns that pretty much are beyond treatment.
Um...arggggghhhh...BHOPAL!!!!
Whoops, sorry. I just sort of blurted that out. Sorry if I scared you.
Anyway from the paper:
After the 1987 Whittier Narrows1 and 1994 Northridge2 earthquakes revealed that blind thrust faults represent a significant threat to metropolitan Los Angeles3, a network of 250 continuously recording global positioning system (GPS) stations4,5 was deployed to monitor displacements associated with deep slip on
both blind and surface faults.Here we augment this GPS data with interferometric synthetic aperture radar imagery
Well enough...but...but...but!!!!!!!!!!!???!!!
Sites of likely long-term anthropogenic deformation in metropolitan Los Angeles are revealed by two-year and ®ve-year interferograms (Fig. 2), with subsidence rates up to 34mmyr-1. and uplift rates as high as 9mm-yr-1. Long-term subsidence is seen in the Santa Ana basin (6±13mmyr-1.), the Wilmington (W, 28mmyr-1.) and the Salt Lake (SL, 11mmyr-1.) oil fields. Groundwater pumping near Chino (C)8 results in a subsidence rate of ,34mmyr-1.. The Santa Fe Springs (SF) and portions of the Baldwin Hills (BH) oil fields are uplifting at 5±9mmyr-1.. Since 1993, fluid injection has exceeded withdrawal in the Baldwin Hills oil field, consistent with the observed uplift.
In other words, folks, THE OIL REMOVAL IS CAUSING THE GROUND TO MOVE IN AN EARTHQUAKE ZONE.
That has to be bad!!!!!!!!
A scientist said!!!!!!!!!!!
Scared yet?
Don't be.
I don't know shit from shinola about strike slip faults, but if I scared you by talking on a subject I know nothing about, don't take it personally.
It's perfectly legitimate, especially if one wishes to make a living by making bad ass disaster movies.
I see that kind of stuff all the time.
The actual Nature paper was about subtracting the effects of oil and groundwater movement in the LA Basin in order to measure the "real" deformation associated with tectonic forces.
Tectonic contraction across Los Angeles After the Removal of Groundwater Pumping Effects.
There are a lot of serious environmental consequences associated with pumping oil (and water) in the LA basin, but I'd guess that "causing earthquakes" isn't among them.
Have a nice evening.