Virginia, Summerville, and OK earthquakes

This is just a cute spread and is nothing like earlier activity when they were injecting hither and yon.  Mostly they look like pure aftershocks.  Most likely the next big earthquake will be unannounced.

Ups and Downs of Cottage Life

Down:  the drought continues.  On the land back of us, all the short shrubs have died, leaving the whole place dry as tinder.

Up:  The fishing is fantastic!  The fish are practically jumping into the boat.  Under our dock are the biggest bass you've ever seen for this area.  But I've trained them over the years not to touch my hook and worm.  But the other day, one of the big ones went for it, and I had my little Walmart rod.  10 minutes of fighting with the drag on light to save the rod, and I pulled it in!  The hook was just lightly jammed.

Was that a good dinner! This will be my new g+ profile picture.

Double down:  We discovered some cottage neighbours were killed coming back from their cottage, when they rolled their truck.......   On the way back yesterday, I was zooming on the 401 when my front passenger tire rim decided to split in two!  Apparently nobody has ever seen this happen.  I was warned by some noise and a big thump, so I was in the shoulder and almost stopped when my rim fell off and rolled ahead of me.  The rubber stayed on, all the lug nuts shattered, and I saw my disk brake made a nice gouge in the shoulder.  I refuse to think how close we were to death.  :(

Two AP1000's can fit at Darlington

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That's what I've always said, and I don't know whether that's worth it.  You could get 4 at Wesleyville!  These things still have to be serviced by giant intake and outflow tunnels.  You can't have cooling towers by the 401 in winter.

Anyway, we don't know if these guys are piddling in the wind.  Are they getting paid for this?

Christchurch, New Orleans, and Haiti

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We're leaving out Japan, because that's a whole different problem.  We are really going to have to do some advance planning to help future disaster areas recover.  All of these places had major problems before the disaster, which just advanced the clock.

I think all cities should have a recovery plan, but that requires facing some hard truths.  New Orleans was sinking, Christchurch was on swamp, and Haiti had all its problems.  All of these make recovery very difficult.  Japan could have easily recovered without the radioactivity, since this was a rare event and could generally be ignored for the next 500 years.

Lima, Peru will be difficult, Lisbon can recover.  All of California is good.  The big tsunami cities in Asia can also recover.  China has shown it can rebuild.  I don't know any city that is really as bad as these three.

Drought at the Cottage

Oh boy it's dry!  All the little shrubs have wilted, and it's going to the small trees.  We better get some rain soon, or it will start getting the bigger trees.  We have virtually no soil right on rock, so a drought can get bad.  We get these every 10-15 years.  Great cottage weather, though.

Another Australian Mining Earthquake

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M4.3.  This is not an unusual size for a mining area, even the previous M5.4.  They are unloading a tremendous volume on a highly stressed crust.  The Sudbury area has had these for years, although most can be traced to deep rockbursts.  It was never any great significance in Sudbury, since most houses are on rock or firm ground.  This size of earthquake can only affect old brick houses on swamp, as we have in Christchurch.

US Injection Earthquake Fun May Be Over

As stated in Geofish Clarified, it started in Ohio.  They have had a few M5+ earthquakes due to injection.  As the shale gas goldrush went 'hockey stick', there was a great demand for injection, with a huge increase in price.  It was only when they injected under a city, that they finally wised up and stopped it.

Then it was fun to watch things migrate down the paths of the megathrusts, into the other states.  Many more earthquakes later, it seems to be calming down, as more bans are instituted.

I have a feeling that even Oklahoma and Texas now have a clue, since huge earthquakes were starting to bubble under big cities.  An M5 or 6 can do a number on the older sections of a city.  I'm now beginning to think they are following the Main Rule:

Do not inject into the fractured Precambrian.

Time will tell.  :)

US Shale Gas Comes to Ontario

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CALGARY — Struggling natural gas markets in Western Canada stand to take a further body blow this winter as infrastructure expansions bring northeast U.S. shale gas to Ontario, says a report from U.S. energy market analysts.

Hey, I'll heat the house with US shale gas.  Do I owe Calgary a living?  This is great, the US gets all the earthquakes, and in the process learns something about Precambrian geology.  We get the cheap gas.  It's a lot better than importing electricity from the Ohio Valley, where we get to choke on all the smog.

If we get flooded with cheap shale gas, then we don't have to do our own injection into the Hamilton Fault.  This might keep away the earthquakes for another year or two.  :)

Linux: NFS Video Streaming

As I've said earlier, all the new video devices do not need to have a media server running.  They can use various network protocols directly.  I have a very old Linux box, running Debian, that is packed with disks.  Actually, new disk servers seem to cost a fortune, and this is a good use for an old tower.

So I had this running well for a while, and suddenly a recent Debian upgrade threw me into a tizzy.  All my videos started to freeze while viewing.  As with all Linux problems, you look it up, and people have had this problem since 2008!  And no clear solution!  When that happens, it is always an obscure configuration problem, and nothing is more obscure than the NFS setup in /etc/exports.

So, screw that, and I found that Samba has more reliable video streaming.  I switched to that and haven't had a problem.  I still have the wdtv on nfs, so I found out that the option 'async' is required for nfs, and also that tcp/ip can be better.  Apparently Debian suddenly went to 'sync' as the default option.  I shall have to see how these option changes work on the wdtv.

Bell internet support is torture!

I was one of the first to get Bell Fibe 25 in my zone.  As such they saddled me with a very crappy router that isn't on anybody's compatibility list.  The windows 7 machines would crap out every hour or so.  Linux was perfect, and I really didn't give a hoot about all those people in the house on windows.  After 2 years, the whining got to me and I started to move.  I bumped up my wireless with an extender, and all the windows machines gave full bars.  Still dropping the connection, and you had to reset the local wireless adapter.  Serious windows crap!

Found out that ancient routers don't play nice with w7 or vice versa.  So, called up Bell with the intent of getting a new modem/router.  Went though 1st level support:  "Turn off your modem, blah, blah"   "I want a new modem."  "Do this and that."  "I want a new modem."

Eventually I got through to 2nd level support.  They were on the worlds worst IP line to Bangalore. I couldn't understand anything.  "How many time does ...scritchy, scritchy."  "Hello?  I want a new modem."  "scritchy, scritchy, blah."  "I want a new modem!"

Finally, they said they are shipping the new modem/router (it's all one).  Of course, the last time they said that, I never got anything.  I shall wait the 2 weeks.  :(

Update:  Got my new 'Connection Hub' today.  It's black with shiny blue lights.  Shiny!  Haven't checked how long things stay connected, but it should work.

Update2:  The new connection hub is no longer dropping Win7.

Arkansas, time to shut down another 2 injection wells

The map is full of the rubble of shut-down injection wells.  If we could go more than 6 months, there would be a lot.  Seems that you get 6 earthquakes, and the well shuts down.  If the wells aren't getting shut down, then you have an interesting 'saturation' phenomenon, but I doubt it.  I wonder if these well guys are making money by this 'smash and grab' technique -- go for the fractured Precambrian, line up all the trucks, and inject like hell, until the earthquakes come.  :)

USGS wakes up to Virginia earthquake

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I'm supposing they have to do something, being so close to Washington and such, and the monument nearly destroyed.  That's very nice that they're going to run a prospecting plane over the area.  This is what we did with the Toronto area, oh so many years ago.

I don't think the magnetics ever really told us much.  It was the reflection seismic that really put the ink into the pot.  They have to run seismic over state lines, and that seems to be impossible.  I wish them luck.

Anti-scientist government making soothing sounds about windmills

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A study on the noise and health effects of wind turbines will be conducted by Health Canada and Statistics Canada following complaints from people living in the area of such installations.


"This study is in response to questions from residents living near wind farms about possible health effects of low-frequency noise generated by wind turbines," said Minister of Health Leona Aglukkaq in a release Tuesday.

You know they can't possibly do this.  It was always the purpose of gov't scientists to maintain credibility, and to squash possible wild panics.  Everybody now knows that all gov't intellectual capital has been burned.  There will next be a nuclear panic, and a food safety scare.

It's been a long time since I tilted at windmills, those horrible things.  Under the right circumstances, the whole wind farm can produce powerful infrasound, much like our famous Windsor Hum.  This is well known from seismic monitoring, but all our seismic monitoring is in the hands of muzzled scientists.

We should get a handle on this infrasound, how far it travels, etc.  Then we should emulate it for a few days on some healthy volunteers, and watch their liver enzymes go wacky.  No so difficult.

Bruce deep thing meeting

Reference


On June 13, 2012, the Joint Review Panel for the Deep Geologic Repository Project for Low and Intermediate Level Radioactive Waste (DGR) invited the public to attend a technical information session on July 18, 2012 in Ottawa, regarding the proposed design, construction and operational details relating to the DGR.
The objective of the full day session is for the Panel to obtain additional information on the sequencing of specific site preparation, construction and operational activities of the DGR, as well as specific information on such matters as blasting, backfill, and mine water management. This information is needed to satisfy the requirements of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) Guidelines issued by government for the DGR. The session is not the venue for the testing of information already on the record.

I'm not following this too closely, since it activates my depression, but others with more Serotonin should have fun.  The game, kiddies, is to see if they mention grout or pumping.  Ideally, we want them to make a fatuous promise that there would be no grout and pumping, since that would violate all their 'stagnant pond' assumptions.  They won't say anything specific, but you can see how close they get.

In reality, they won't get down 50 feet before they bring in the grout trains and start pumping out the lake into the lake.  The real trick is to see if this raises any eyebrows, since the panel will have been dissolved by then, and the regulators are sleepy.

Background can be read on Geofish Clarified.

A fine Newfoundland Earthquake M4.4

Well, another great weekend at the cottage, and look what we have here!  This size of earthquake can only wake people up.  Like Australia, we can have up to an M6 happening randomly in this rock, and I remember there was one further north.  The old rock is highly stressed, and it is only because the glaciers munged up the rock that we don't have more of these earthquakes.

Looking at the nice picture, I am reminded of the monster Grand Banks earthquake, and how the passive continental margin can be host to large earthquakes.  As you can see,  we are still quite close to the spreading ridge, so the oceanic crust is fairly young and hot.  But as it cools, it no longer has the will to live, and those Higgs bosons try to drag it down.  Eventually, the cold crust will fold down and start to sink, like the skin of an old Sumo guy.

Texas earthquake M2.7

Although the locations and magnitudes are as crude as an 8-bit map, we may be seeing the beginning of an Arkansas structure.  That is, the first earthquakes are on a NW trend, and there may be a NE shear wing.  This could be resolved if they had better monitoring, but then that would mean they care, and might stop the injection.  Can't have that!  We've had our 3's, and now we wait for a 4.

Canada and Orvis

We ordered from the Orvis catalogue, and I just want to report that it was not a pleasant experience, since we had to return everything once, because things were tighter than we were used to.  You really get dinged for shipping.  It must be fine for the US.

M2.5 earthquake New Madrid Zone

Ok, this is an insignificant earthquake, but I want to show how small the circles are, and what a nice pattern it makes.

Now, the Texas, OK, and Col earthquakes are only giant blocks.

This is because there is no decent seismic monitoring in the area (at least not mapped).  Thus, only the large earthquakes are shown.  You can't see if a pattern is developing.  For NM, it would be significant if the central thrust zone extended to Dyersburg.  That would be as exciting as not finding the Higgs!  For TexyOk, the M's 1 and 2 might define what the injection is actually doing, and we'll never know that.

But these people have all those storms, and a little earthquake is nothing.  They'll keep injecting and maybe somebody intelligent might come and monitor it.

Linux Leap Second

So, today I'm on my Linux machine, and it's smoking!  All 6 processors running, and the extra fans all roaring.  Naturally, I blamed it on Chrome and started turning off all the plugins, etc.

It wasn't Chrome!  It was the Leap Second Bug!  I updated and finally did a reboot.  Now the computer is not adding to the air conditioning load.  Phew!

New Zealand gets a deep earthquake

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This is interesting, since when you look at the earthquake upside-down, from their perspective it is an M7.  But from our right-side-up view, it is an M6.2.  :)

Anyway, these horrendously deep earthquakes are a bitch to properly size, and the journals can have it.  Who cares?  As you can see, they have a really active subduction zone, and are sure to get their M9 every 500 years or so.  The deep quake probably isn't related to anything since the physics down there gets bizarre, involving phase changes and such.  Not good old sliding wet rock!