Kilauea fills Kapoho Bay in Hawaii
The eruption of Kilauea is fascinating. We’re watching the creation of new earth in real time. This week, as Kilauea enters its 35th year of eruption, we see it completely fill in Kapoho Bay. The lava extended the shoreline out by approximately 750 yards. Many of the seaside homes and attractions were destroyed by the lava flows but it seems as most people had evacuated before it was too late
An oil rig.
Eric Hand reports on a new study in Science Magazine that attempts to correlate an increase in seismic activity in Oklahoma to the hydraulic fracturing boom there. Oklahoma has had more magnitude 3 earthquakes this year than California. In the process of extracting natural gas, large amounts of water are pumped or stored underground. The pressure that is built up is thought to weaken the forces keeping a fault locked, and potentially trigger a rupture. The study by Katie Keranen suggest that the pressure build up could trigger seismic activity as far as 35 km away, and could one day threaten Oklahoma City:
The vast majority of Oklahoma’s more than 9000 injection wells cause no trouble whatsoever. Not so with four high-volume disposal wells used in a dewatering operation near Oklahoma City, the study suggests. The wells pump more than 4 million barrels (477,000 cubic meters) of water into the ground every month. Katie Keranen, a geophysicist at Cornell University, and colleagues found that the four wells are capable of triggering the earthquakes. By combining precise maps of Jones swarm earthquakes with a hydrogeologic model, they showed that an expanding underground wave of pressure from the wells (named Chambers, Flower Power, Deep Throat, and Sweetheart) closely matched the places and times of the quakes in the swarm. The company that owns the wells, New Dominion, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, declined to answer questions about the study and released a statement saying that it was based on “false assumptions.”
Keranen is concerned that the four disposal wells lie close to the Nemaha fault, which runs through Oklahoma City and is large enough to host a devastating magnitude-7 earthquake. The main fault is unlikely to rupture because local stresses push its two sides together, Keranen says, but an unmapped offshoot might be more susceptible to rising water pressures. In the long term, a magnitude-6 earthquake near Oklahoma City is a plausible hazard, she says.
Curiosity left these imprints in Martian soil after scooping up rock samples.
Curiosity has been analyzing rocks on Mars for a while now. Popular Science updates on it’s findings:
The presence of perchlorate may be the biggest news from the press conference, which kicked off the day at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco. The Mars Phoenix lander also saw evidence of this chlorine-oxygen compound, which could conceivably be used as an energy source by Martian microbes. The analysis of these chemicals–which involves baking samples inside SAM’s oven and measuring the vapors that come out–in and of itself created new chemicals which the sensitive instruments picked up. Among those newly formed chemicals were some chlorinated methane compounds.The chlorine is from Mars, Mahaffy said. The carbon’s origin is still unclear. Scientists will try to figure it out by measuring isotope ratios and making other measurements.
Other results from Curiosity’s first few months on Mars include some analysis of the soil and rocks, which are apparently very similar in both chemical composition and appearance to rocks in other spots on the planet. The Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity rovers saw very similar soil in different locations. At Curiosity’s present location, a site in Gale Crater called Rocknest, the soil is about half volcanic material and half crystalline materials, like glass. Interestingly, the water bound up in this soil is much, much heavier than water in Earth’s oceans, Mahaffy said.
So no extraterrestrial life just yet. But the data is still pouring in.