North Dakota Is Truly Blessed -- No Fault Lines -- No Earthquakes to Worry About -- The Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Updates

February 21, 2012: New Madrid fault earthquake, magnitude 4.0, reported, centered in Missouri, and 12 surrounding states, most of which have no significant drilling activity, and even less fracking activity.

Original Post

Bloomberg link here.

With regard to fracking and earthquakes:

Ausbrooks did a study with the University of Memphis and concluded there was “a plausible relationship between the injection wells and the earthquakes” after a previously unknown fault system was discovered, he said.

I don't know if folks recall the 1812 New Madrid earthquake:

The 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquakes were an intense intraplate earthquake series beginning with an initial pair of very large earthquakes on December 16, 1811. These earthquakes remain the most powerful earthquakes ever to hit the eastern United States in recorded history. These events, as well as the seismic zone of their occurrence, were named for the Mississippi River town of New Madrid, then part of the Louisiana Territory, now within Missouri.

Faux-environmentalists believed these earthquakes were due to alligators used as cannon, until they realized that technology was not developed until three years later, in 1814 ... 




Battle of New Orleans, Johnny Horton

Then, they noted that a small oil company out of Chesapeake, Virginia, had been looking for oil near New Madrid, using dynamite to help drill, in 1811 - 1812.

"Fire in the frickin' hole" was the Chesapeake Company's dynamite cry to make sure folks were clear, and that's the origin of the term fracking, by the way....but I digress.

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On a completely different note, and absolutely nothing to do with the Bakken, physicists are close to announcing that they have found evidence of the "God particle."

LA Times link here.

Physicists announced Tuesday that they had detected "tantalizing hints," but not definitive proof, of the long-sought Higgs boson, the so-called God particle that is crucial to physicists' understanding of why mass exists in the universe.

Two large teams of scientists based at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva separately saw what they believe are telltale tracks of the maddeningly elusive particle in the aftermath of about 400 trillion proton collisions carried out since January.

Neither group had solid enough evidence to announce an official discovery, they reported. But the fact that both teams generated similar results — and that those results were in good alignment with the predictions of theoretical physicists — indicated that scientists may be closing in on the Higgs at last.

It is my understanding that this puts the president in a good position to win the Nobel Prize in Physics to accompany his Nobel Peace Prize.

Just as he had nothing in his resume to justify the Nobel Peace Prize, winning the Nobel Prize in Physics will make him a good role model for American students.

The president had this to say about that:

"It's looking very good," said the president, who was not involved in the experiments but has been following them closely. "What's really important is that both teams see the same thing."

Now if only both teams in Congress could see the same thing ... that we need to extend the tax cuts to be funded by entrepreneurs and small businesses."

"Following the experiments closely" assures that the president has a good chance of winning the Nobel Prize in Physics.