HUMAN ENGINEERED EARTHQUAKES

Dr. Hrishikesh Baruah

Asst. Professor (Sr.), Department of Geology, Arya Vidyapeeth College,

Guwahati: 781 016

hbaruah@hotmail.com ; +919864030992

For a common man, earthquake is a manifestation of nature’s discontent. Many people may never comprehend the fact that human beings have acquired the capability to produce earthquakes long back. So, when an earthquake occurs, very few would ever even bother to think, "Was that natural or man-made?” In fact, human activities can trigger earthquakes unwittingly or calculatedly in the most undesired places.

Human-caused quakes are mostly tiny, registering less than four on geologist’s seismic scales and they don’t occur along natural faults but can be attributed to mining tons of say, coal leading to mine’s roof collapses. However, some human actions can trigger much larger quakes along natural fault lines simply because anthropogenic activities can toss enough mass around to shift the pattern of stresses in the Earth’s crust. Faults those were hitherto dormant for a million years can suddenly be pushed to failure.

What are the ways by which anthroquakes can be triggered?

Big dams that retain huge quantities of water can generate earthquakes by what can be called "hydro-fracturing," in which weight of the water stresses fractures in the underlying rock. A leading scholar on the topic, H. K. Gupta (2002) in his review of studies on Reservoir Triggered Seismicity (RTS) highlights that globally, there are over 90 identified sites of earthquakes triggered by the filling of water reservoirs. In fact, the largest and most damaging earthquake (M = 6.3) triggered by a man-made reservoir occurred in 1967 in Koyna, India. India experienced two more such quakes due to failures in 1983 at Bhatsa in Maharashtra (M = 4.9) and 1993 at Killari or ‘Latur’ in SW India (M = 6.1). China has had a number of RTS incidents. In fact scientists say it is possible that the 320 millions of tons of water in the Zipingpu Dam played a direct role in the devastating earthquake in Sichuan, China in May 2008. Christian Klose (2008), a geophysical hazards research scientist from Columbia University explained using geophysical data, how it likely happened. RTS trends show that the magnitude of the foreshock is higher than the magnitude of the aftershock and, both values are generally higher than in cases of natural earthquakes. Latest moves to tap the hydroelectric potential of north east India may increase the probability of RTS as this region is one of the most tectonically active places in the whole world.

Waste disposal, particularly if it is toxic has been a headache for the civic planners. In early 1960s, Denver, a relatively earthquake free city experienced an uncharacteristic series of tremors. Geologist, David Evans traced the cause to a 4000 metres deep sewage disposal well which penetrated a fault zone in the Rocky Mountains.

Globally 75% of extracted coal is used for electricity production. In case of India, it is 67%. Such a situation demands that a lot of coal mines work overtime. To meet the demands, miners pulled 6,195 million metric tons of coal out of the Earth in 2006 alone. Often water needs to be pumped out along with the coal, sometimes extracting dozens of times as much water as coal. This leads to a lot of mass transfer that can modify the prevailing stress-strain regime in an area thereby leading to a quake. The greatest earthquake in Australia's history that reached 5.6 in magnitude struck Newcastle in New South Wales on December 28, 1989, killing 13 people, injuring 160, and provoking damages estimated to 3.5 billion U.S. dollars. Tectonic changes, due to 200 years of underground coal mining, were the trigger.

Three of the biggest anthroquakes (M ranging between 6.9 and 7.3) of all time occurred in Uzbekistan's Gazli natural gas field between 1976 and 1984. The combination of liquid extraction and injection changed the tectonic system in the field. A similar situation also occurred in the late 1960s in an oilfield near Rangely in Colorado.

Way back in 2005, a geologist claimed that the world’s then-tallest building, the Taipei 101 weighing more than 700,000 metric tons, was stimulating earthquakes in a long-dormant fault in Taiwan. Although it isn’t outside the realm of possibility for a building to create an earthquake, more studies are necessary to be done.

Tectonic warfare has been a less known and classified field of research and activities definitely having its roots in the concepts of telegeodynamics as developed by the visionary scientist Nikola Tesla. While celebrating his 79^th birthday in 1935, Tesla shared with reporters the concepts of what he described as "controlled earthquakes." After his death in 1943, the US Government confiscated all of his papers, and the FBI declared them classified until further notice.

Nuclear explosions also cause earthquakes that are felt as shaking and recorded by seismographs all around the world. But not even the largest bomb test has ever induced a natural earthquake.

Climate and carbon are set to influence one and all in the coming future. That global warming can influence earthquakes was one of the conclusions of the researchers who got together at the conference on ‘Climate Forcing of Geological and Geomorphological Hazards’ in London on September 2009. That a link between climate and the rumblings of the crust exists has been around for years, but only now is it becoming clear just how sensitive rock can be to the air, ice and water above.

Subtle changes in sea level do influence under water seismicity. Researchers have found a distinct relationship between El Nino and quakes on the Easter micro plate - the tectonic plate that lies beneath the ocean off the coast of Easter Island. Since 1973, the arrival of El Nino every few years has correlated with a greater frequency of underwater. El Nino raises the local sea level by a few tens of centimetres and most likely, the extra water weight may increase the pressure of fluids in the pores of the rock beneath the seabed. This might be enough for faults to slip.

Even our attempts to stall global warming could trigger a catastrophic event. Scientific community’s untiring efforts to fight the menace of global warming resulted in the concept of carbon sequestration which is basically a composite of geo-engineering techniques developed with a mission for the long-term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon so that the buildup of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is reduced. Geological sequestration looks very promising. Bury the carbon dioxide away underground and forget about it. But, geophysicists are concerned that burying the carbon could trigger earthquakes and tsunamis.

In a carbon sequestration power plant (CCS), carbon dioxide is extracted from the exhaust then pumped into aquifers and old gas fields several kilometres beneath the Earth's surface. However, carbon dioxide expands as it rises through the porous rock, increasing pressure inside that may be enough to reactivate a fault and trigger an earthquake. According to Ernest Majer, a seismologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, chemical reactions between the injected carbon dioxide, water and rock could also destabilise the rock. Storage sites far from human settlements may also pose threats.

Indeed! We have progressed a lot.

USING THE EARTH ITSELF AS A WEAPON

Dr. Hrishikesh Baruah

Senior Lecturer, Department of Geology, Arya Vidyapeeth College,
Guwahati: 781 016

hbaruah@hotmail.com ; +919864030992

How many of us would ever have such a weird dream? Isn’t the theme of this write-up astonishing? Well! While surfing the net, I came across something interesting. In the 1985 James Bond film ‘A View to a Kill’, Christopher Walken who plays the bad guy, Max Zorin is a business magnate dealing with microchips. Zorin planned to blow-up the San Andreas Fault outside San Francisco which would cause a massive earthquake that will flood Silicon Valley and thus help Zorin monopolise. Max Zorin had in fact, declared tectonic war on the United States.

War has been an avoidable craze of mankind since ages. Factually, any war is fought by specific warfare(s) with the purpose of compelling the defeated side to do the will of the victor. Warfare is the activity of fighting a war, especially using particular weapons or methods. Warfare may be conventional as well as unconventional (c.f., www.wikipedia.org). Conventional warfare types are defensive, offensive, jungle, border, urban, desert, maneuver, trench, mountain, arctic and naval while, unconventional warfare types are guerilla, psychological, biological, chemical, mine, air, sub-aquatic, space, electronic, cyber, directed energy, nuclear and tribal or gang. What about ‘tectonic war’?

Our Earth has been in a very dynamic state both externally as well as internally since its birth. While external dynamisms are reflected in terms of say, weather and climatic variations with respect to space and time, plate movements, earthquakes, volcanism, etc. are manifestations of internal dynamism. Plate movements engineered by the Earth’s endogenetic energy system leads to accumulation of stress at certain locations. When tolerance level of the stressed rock units exceeds, strain is accompanied by expulsion of the excessive energy in the form of earthquakes. ‘Internal forces’ of the Earth is a great architect which sculptures a myriad of structures in the rocks and governs their disposition in particular trends in a larger scale. In this context, ‘structure’ is a form acquired by rocks in response to the stresses affecting it, may be more than once with variable intensities and from different directions. Tectonics is study of major structural features of the Earth’s crust. Structural and tectonic studies can highlight the level of vulnerability of a region in terms of seismicity. A more vulnerable region will need less energy (stress) for it to succumb leading to an earthquake. Imagine, if this energy is human induced.

While nuclear prowess is something many nations would desire to acquire with continuity, the weapons of war in the new millennium would involve the use of Planet Earth itself wherein the power of natural processes would be harnessed. An internationally acclaimed expert on radiation, Rosalie Bertell in her book, "Planet Earth: the Latest Weapon of War" (2000), revealed this unbelievable truth. In fact, the latest weapon in the arsenal of the US military is Planet Earth itself. Similarly, mankind has achieved that much of technological proficiency to play with the Earth’s exo-dynamic setup. Weather will be one of the worst destructive weapons by the year 2025.

This endeavour tries to ensemble a few available scraps highlighting the destructive human endeavours.
HAARP, (America's High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) has been a scientific venture aimed at studying the properties and behaviour of the ionosphere (upper layer of the atmosphere), with the objective of understanding and using it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes.
However, HAARP and similar installations in Russia also create pulsed, extremely low frequency (ELF) waves which have been directed deep into the earth itself. The ELF waves or energy systems interfere with and influence the Earth’s own endogenetic energy system producing what is known in the scientific lexicon as the ‘Tesla Effect’. The ELF waves can be used to convey mechanical effects and vibrations across intercontinental distances to any selected target site on the globe with force levels equivalent to major nuclear explosions. These waves have the potential to generate earth movements that can cause disturbance of volcanoes and tectonic plates, which in turn, have an effect on the weather. They can manipulate the weather, creating storms and torrential rains over an area.
Literatures state many earthquakes being preceded by certain unexplained phenomena. The Tang Shan earthquake in China, which occurred on 28 July 1976 and left 650,000 people dead was a catastrophic event preceded by an airglow, said to have been caused by Soviet ELF wave experiments to heat the ionosphere. Unusual ultra low frequency waves were detected in California on 12 September 1989. These waves grew in intensity and finally subsided on 5 October. On 17 October, they appeared again with signals so strong that they went off the scale. Three hours later, the earthquake took place. Enigmatically, an earthquake in Bolivia in 1994 originated 600 km below the earth's surface - 24 times deeper than normal.
Weather modification has been on the US air force and Russian agenda since long time. Way back in 1992 the Russians told the Wall Street Journal they could already achieve it. However, the crux of the problem is that does anyone have the wisdom to control weather wisely, and unselfishly? As Dr. Bertell points out, it is since the inception of Star Wars experiments that El Nino has changed its cycle and become far more severe with devastating effects. In 1996 severe flooding affected Nepal, India, Bangladesh and China in which millions were left homeless. At the same time, Canada was hit by torrential rains, flooding, tornadoes, hail and thunderstorms that seemed like very abnormal climatic conditions. Similarly, heavy snowfall not seen in decades, appeared in South Africa cutting off food supplies and taking lives due to the extreme cold. Disasters of such magnitudes have been doubted by many experts as human engineered.
If somebody loves watching clouds, the menu card offers a lot these days in the form of artificial clouds of different shapes due to atmospheric aerosols. These artificial clouds are thought of by many as being ‘natural’ since aerosols have been gradually introduced for many years in the atmosphere simply because they facilitate functioning of very advanced electromagnetic technology. Scientists studying earthshine say that the planet appeared to dim from 1984 to 2001 and then brightened from 2001 to 2003. These variations were due to the amount of clouds covering the planet. More clouds reflect more light back into space, potentially cooling the planet, while a dimmer planet would mean warming up. That means the changes in brightness could signal climate change.
Our planetary atmosphere has been a dump-yard of particulate matters which are highly charged, electrically-conductive and useful for military projects. The air we breathe is laden with asbestos-sized synthetic fibers and toxic metals, including barium salts, aluminum, and reportedly, radioactive thorium. Atmospheric barium weakens human muscles, including those of the heart. Inhaled aluminum goes directly to the brain and medical specialists confirm that it causes oxidative stress within brain tissue. These are death-defying times for human beings and all living things. As Dr. Gwen Scott (2009) puts it, “………our air supply is a toxic soup because of chemtrails. Once inhaled, they become systemic in less than a minute”.
The Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques enforced from 5 October 1978 prohibits using the environment as a weapon in conflicts. However, ENMOD is being deployed by militaries around the world despite the prohibition. It seems like science fiction to most people when they first hear of it, but these military programmes have been developing for decades.
Clearly, the fact that military activities can cause freak weather or an earthquake by accident as well as deliberately as part of geophysical / tectonic warfare, is indeed a frightening prospect for the Planet.