Stuff You Should Know - Can humans start an earthquake?

Episode Date: May 27, 2010

In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss reservoir-induced seismicity and the conditions under which human activities and projects like dams can trigger earthquakes. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by GoToMeeting. We all have to meet, but the average cost of a single business trip is $1,000. With just one click, you can save time and money and have your meetings online with affordable and easy-to-use GoToMeeting. Use GoToMeeting for sales presentations, product demos, training sessions, collaborating on

documents and more. And at $49 per month for unlimited meetings, it saves time, money, and travel. Try GoToMeeting free for 30 days. Visit GoToMeeting.com slash Stuff. That's GoToMeeting.com slash Stuff. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You know us as Chuck and Josh.

We debated this. It's Josh and Chuck. It's Chuck and Josh now. Dude, it's... What do you mean now? Well, it was Josh and Chuck, and then it became Chuck and Josh, I'm sure in the future, it'll just keep rotating. It's like the wheel of time, right?

I just... Josh and Chuck has a ring that I enjoy. How about Josh or Chuck? And Matt. Yeah, with special guest producer Matt. Jerry's not here to spank us when we air. No, which means we can get away with a lot of stuff, although I think we're self-regulating these days.

Yeah, we're doing pretty well. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. Chuck. Yes. You want to get into it? Sure. You remember the earthquake in May of 2008? In China?

Sichuan province. Yeah. Yeah. It killed like 80,000 people, I think, right? Awful. A 7.9. Yes. The old Richter scale.

Right. That's how you pronounce it. I thought you spoke German. I just thought it'd be funny if we mispronounced like even things that everybody knows, because we have a reputation for mispronouncing difficult things. All right, let's start doing it. The Richter scale. Okay.

Well, on the Richter scale, can we do that? Sure. It hit a, what did you say? A 7.9? Yeah, thereabouts. And like I said, killed 80,000 people. It was an enormous, horrific earthquake. And very quickly, I remember NPR was there because they were covering the Olympics, so

everybody went to Sichuan instead because it was right before the Olympics, right? We were here. We were here, but NPR did like a month of coverage on this earthquake. Everybody was talking about it. One thing that flew under the radar, at least my radar, was that there were and still are allegations that the earthquake was actually man-made, at least hastened by a man-made structure. Yeah.

Specifically the... You're pointing at me, the zipping, zipping poo dam. Something like that. Zipping poo. Zipping poo. Yeah, that's something like that. Yeah. Yeah, flew below my radar too.

I had no idea about this. Did you see that? Like on a search, there's like tons of articles on it, they just got no play. Yeah. Yeah. So, what we're talking about is something that's called reservoir-induced seismicity. Yes. Right?

And to a certain degree, induced seismicity to a greater extent. I don't know what you just said. Not only reservoirs. I've got a couple of other nuggets. Yeah. Chuck dug up some other man-made earthquake phenomena, right? Sure. But let's start with reservoir-induced seismicity, right?

Or let's start with dams. How about that? Well, that's a good place to start. Or should we start with earthquakes? Actually, if you want to know about earthquakes, go listen to our How Earthquakes Work podcast, which is pretty good. Did we do that? Yeah.

Yeah. I'm getting old. I know. Days are just kind of melting together. I was honestly thinking, we should do one on earthquakes. Yeah, we already did. Okay. Remember the S-waves?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure. All right. So, we'll talk about dams instead. These things are, well, dams are getting bigger and bigger as our engineering prowess. Not ours, but humanity is getting better and better. And our needs are growing. Right.

Sure. So, constructing a dam in the first place, what you're doing is you're just putting a wall up in front of a river and letting the water backfill, right? Pretty easy. But by doing this, number one, you're changing the river hydrology downstream. Yeah. E.g., the people downstream are in big trouble. Right.

Sure. But you're also, you have to take into account the area around the dam. What was normally once just dry land, right, with a river running through it, and probably some villages, you know, Lake Lanier, I think there's no natural lake in Georgia. They're all man-made from what I understand. That's what I understand, too. But Lake Lanier specifically has a town beneath it. And when the reservoir lowers, decreases, you can see a Gulf 76 sign popping up out

of it. Have you ever seen that? No, really? It's creepy. That is creepy. It dies in Lake Lanier because they get caught up in, like, power lines or in a convenience store or something like that. Shopping.

Yeah, under the water. Shopping dead. Uh-huh. Yeah. But around this area, in what used to be dry land, there's also dirt and rock and oftentimes mountains. Sometimes fault lines. Because you want to use the natural geography of the area to hold this water, right?

You ever been to the Hoover Dam? I haven't. I've flown over it. Does that count? Well, sure. I've flown over it at, like, 10,000 feet. Yeah. If you ever go, this is, I mean, a lot of people drive over the Hoover Dam or they stand on

the edge of the Hoover Dam, like Bob Mould suggests. But I suggest that if you're there, take the time to pay the dough. It's like, I don't know how much it is, 10 bucks, and go down and take the tour. Wow. That's my only tip of the day. I've seen it on the TV. It's really cool-looking. Yeah.

And you can stand there and marvel at it. But when you get down on the guts of it, it's when you're really, like, whoa. Yeah. It's a marvel of engineering. Absolutely. Right. And, like I said, it utilizes the surrounding geography to hold the water, right? But when you do this, you're applying a lot of water that didn't used to be there to the

surrounding, say, mountains, right? Yeah. And all of a sudden, you have something that we call landslides, right? Yes. And that's what's usually you think of, you don't think of earthquakes when you think of that kind of activity, you think of landslides. Right. So I'm going to tell them about the Italian landslide because you love to do the accents.

Yeah. But do it in a really somber tone. Well, I'm not going to do it in an Italian accent. But it is one of the deadliest in history, and it was in Northern Italy in 63, and it killed 2,500 people. An entire village is wiped out when 400 million cubic yards of mountain rock fell into the reservoir. I'm not going to pronounce that.

The Viandam? Yeah. It looks French. Yeah. Well, it's in the Alps. So it's close to France. Yeah. And it basically created tidal wave 856 feet tall.

Right. So this 400 million cubic yards of rock goes into the reservoir. It just places all that water. And yeah, the wave I read, this wave that was generated by it, it crested over the top of the dam. Yeah. The dam was 856, so it was higher than that. It was 28, it was equal to a 28-story building.

And on top of the dam, and it just came down and washed villages away. You're just sitting there in Italy in 63 enjoying your grappa, having a good time. Not for long. No. But apparently it took a full two minutes to get down there to wipe out the village. How long? Two minutes. Wow.

From what I read. That's like the thing. The mudslide in Guatemala. No warning. No. And there's also some in China that apparently have been pretty disastrous. Thanks to a dam there, the Three Gorges Dam, which is a pretty famous dam. It's on the Yangtze River, right?

Yeah. They were kind of worried about that one. Yeah. And they kind of should be from what I understand, whenever just about any time they raise or lower the reservoir or when they initially filled it, landslides started happening. And there was one in 2007 that buried a bus. I guess it just kind of caught them unawares. What a horrific death.

To be buried in a bus? Well, to be buried alive in any way, but yeah, a bus would probably be bad. Especially in a bus. Have you ever taken a bus trip? Yes. I would not want to be buried alive on a bus trip. No, I would. No.

Because you're like, I can't believe I'm surrounded by these people while I'm alive. Exactly. Yeah. Not to make light of it. No. Okay. They want to come across as insensitive. No.

So Chuck, these are just landslides we're talking about. That's a totally different, destabilizing the dirt that holds up mountain rock is totally different from an earthquake, right? Indeed. So how do we get to the reservoir-induced seismicity? How do we get to a dam creating an earthquake? Well, in the case of the one in China, the zipping Poo Dam is 50 stories tall. It can store more than one billion cubic meters of water from the Minjiang River.

So all of a sudden you have a regular river, and then all of a sudden it weighs a billion cubic meters more. Well, that's not a weight, but you know what I mean. So that's going to create a lot more pressure on the ground beneath it. Right. And if there's a fault line there, then you're in big trouble. And we don't really know whether there are fault lines there. When we're constructing dams, it turns out.

Apparently, there was a survey in 1990 by the World Bank that found that 49 projects, like more than three-quarters of them that were surveyed, all had unexpected geological activity. Right? Yeah. And apparently it cost millions and millions to do a survey of an area. And you may find that, yeah, there's a fault line there that we didn't know about. So companies who build dams oftentimes don't want to know whether or not there's a fault

line there. I've seen that. Not a lot of research goes in. Well, I don't want to say not a lot of research, but many times not enough research goes into the underground situation. Right. And for the three gorges dam, there actually is built over two fault lines. And they're just waiting for this thing to blow apparently.

Yeah. And they said it might be a big one too. So with the 2008 earthquake, China kind of got into this issue of reservoir-induced seismicity. And it's already kind of cloudy. It's kind of one of those walks like a duck scenarios. Because you have increased seismic activity in areas as reservoirs are being filled. You have earthquakes that people weren't expecting, obviously. But even geologists weren't expecting, seismologists, with an epicenter under the dam.

So it's like, yes, dams are creating earthquakes. But again, there's a lot of money at stake if people become more aware of RIS, which is what people in the know call it, then people who live downstream from a dam are going to want their houses earthquake-proof, which is going to raise the cost through the roof. Yeah. They're not going to do that. Right. And like I said, with China now, it's become obfuscated even further.

Yeah. Because in the case of China, there's probably a lot of houses that need to be retrofitted. Well, not just that. Like the government's politically in the hot seat right now and the earthquake in 2008, they tried to distance themselves because it was a government project. In building a dam in and of itself, it's a very utilitarian pursuit if a dam can create an earthquake and kill people or their landslides, and that kills people because you're helping X number of people.

Like the Zipingpu Dam generates like 760,000 kilowatts, kilowatt hours of electricity. Oh, yeah. You need dams for sure. You do, but at the same time, so it's kind of like, okay, well, there's a bus full of people that just got buried, but we have all this electricity. Right. So when you throw that in, when you throw the money in, and then a 1994 paper in the Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation, do you get that?

That sounds like a laugh a minute. It does. It concluded that people in other countries who were affected by reservoir induced seismicity from American built dams had legal grounds to sue those people in the U.S. for damages. Right. Well, that's a resume. So basically there's a lot of people out there who are like, RIS doesn't exist, but it does.

Right. Yeah. And it's not just the water pressure sitting on top of these plates that can cause it. What also happens is the water seeps down in there and fills up all the little cracks. And if there's way more water doing this, then that can cause fractures to become larger or to shift around. And that, you know, that might be one of the reasons too. Right.

And it also lubricates it. Doesn't it? It goes down to these fault lines because you think about it, like you have tectonic plates, you have fault lines where the earth is basically sitting like just on the tiniest ledge of one plate over another. And if you get some water in there and lube it up, then they slip and you have an earthquake. It's called pore pressure, my friend. Nice.

So pore pressure is the fluid pressure in the pores and the fractures of the rocks. And it acts against the weight of the rock. So when pore pressure is low, the imbalance of what they call it in situ earth, have you ever heard that phrase? Does it mean like stable bedrock or something like that? Sort of. It's Latin. It's been a bunch of different things, but in the case of the earth, it means in the

place as in water or oil that hasn't been extracted yet. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or gas, let's say, whatever's down there, any kind of natural earth. So the imbalance of the in situ earth stresses will cause the occasional earthquake. And if the pore pressure is increased, then it takes a lot less of an imbalance for these to get out of whack. And one of the reasons that that might happen is if you inject something into the subsurface or if you extract something from the subsurface, like maybe oil or water or gas.

And that all made sense because I've often posed the question, does the earth need its oil? Like, you know, we're extracting oil, but maybe it has a really vital function down there. Maybe it's a lubricant. And I found out that that wasn't necessarily true, that, you know, if we pull out all the oil from the oil, we can't pull out all the oil. I think it leaves about a third.

They leave at least a third in all reservoirs because we just don't have the technology to get. Really? Yeah. But what I gathered from researching this a little bit today is that it doesn't necessarily, it's such a small amount still compared to the density of the earth that these like small empty pockets might make things move around and cause like some minor tremors, but it's not like we're going to have the big one one day if we tap the oil out of the

earth. But we also use like water injection technology too. Bingo. And that can cause an earthquake, right? Yeah. And that's when you, you inject like steam or water or CO2 to either move the oil around or heat it up, make it more viscous. And that means it'll flow to a channel where it's easier to tap it or they do that for

water wells too. Right. To make water more readily available. I think there were some earthquakes, some surprising earthquakes in Colorado in the 90s that had to do with natural gas drilling. Oh really? Yeah. Well, you know, the other thing they do is they inject wastewater into the earth.

I did not know that. I didn't either. I always wondered where it went. Well, a lot of it, they read. I just assumed we were all drinking it. Well, I think it's a certain amount we do, but there's way more wastewater than there are mouths to drink it. So evidently, they'll drill down into the earth and inject, uh, they'll supposedly

clean it. I say supposedly they clean it. Yeah. I've never witnessed it, but why would they lie? Why would they lie? I don't know. I mean, who would lie when money's at stake? So they, they inject the wastewater back into the earth and, uh, that's, you know, hasn't

created any problems thus far. Yeah. Yet. Who knows? I remember, we talked about like carbon sequestration, uh, once where we were talking about taking CO2, remember capturing it from smokestacks and then putting it into the earth. And we were wondering like, what, what effect is that going to have? Who knows?

Probably. Well, we'll all find out what he, when we do hit the big one, right? From removing oil and then injecting like carbon, CO2 into the earth. Right. We'll find out what happens. So many of these studies are all like, Oh no, it's not doing anything. But like, I'm of the belief that holding a cell phone up to your brain is going to cause some damage.

Another saying, no, it doesn't, but we haven't studied anyone who's done it for 30 years every day. Right. Yeah. It's a good point. And then iPhone's like a little computer, you know? I know. It's like, I think we're going to see some fallout from that in about 25, 30 years, brother.

You know, Conger over at stuff mom never told you wrote it, uh, an article on cell phones making a sterile. Oh, well, keep it in your pocket. Yeah. Next to the boys. I don't want to do that. So Chuck, one more thing we should say, uh, very specifically that, uh, even though people, it seems like there is a consensus that RIS does exist.

Right. Yes. Um, and, uh, there's a lot of people who want to downplay it. Sure. Like the Chinese pointed out that prior to this earthquake that, that in, in Szechuan in 2008, the, the biggest RIS linked earthquake happened in 1967 in India. And it was like, uh, 6.5 and they point that that was the biggest ever that was induced by a dam.

Right. Right. So we're not entirely certain how, uh, how, how big these things can be, um, or how, how much dams can contribute. But again, we don't really know what we're doing. Building dams either. Do we? Right.

Right. Mining too. That can cause them. And I also read that, um, building construction, like that tower in Taipei, that, that, that cause some minor earthquakes, cause it was so big. That's gotta put hair on your chest. If you're the project manager of a, of a, of a project that causes earthquakes. Sure.

Yeah. Press on. And we should also point out lastly, uh, dams can't create earthquakes all by themselves. There have to be a bunch of factors present. Like it has to be built on a fault line. Right. Right. It has to be huge.

The dam, I think has to be at least a hundred meters high to create earthquakes that really register. But pretty much anytime you build a dam, uh, like around a fault line, seismic activity increases as you fill it up. So it's gonna happen. Yeah. We're not anti-dam. We should point that out.

We love dams. Yeah. I guess that's it. Right. Uh, I think so. I don't have anything else. All right. Well, if you want to read a little more about this and see some, uh, gripping pictures, you

can type in, uh, humans and earthquakes. I think that'll probably bring this article up. Right. Probably so. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by GoToMeeting, the affordable way to meet with clients and colleagues. For your free 30-day trial, visit gotomeeting.com slash stuff. And uh, this is a short one, Chuck, isn't it?

Yeah. I have some stuff to inject here at the end and to our subsurface. Uh, we have some announcements about New York, right? And T-shirts. Yeah. We're going to New York. You know, we're going to New York. We're going to like throw our hat and do a little twirl in the middle of Times Square

because we made it after all. Um, we're going to be at the knitting factory. We're having a Stuff You Should Know meet and greet. Happy hour. With fans. Happy hour. Uh-huh. Come hang out with us.

Um, you pay for your own drinks or whatever, but we're not charging anything to get in. Yeah. We may or may not be wearing shirts, uh, and it's going to be at the knitting factory. We're going to have shirts. We're going to have T-shirts. We can go ahead and say that. We are. We're going to have shirts.

Stuff You Should Know T-shirts. The very first ones. And Josh designed it. That's how awesome it is. Oh, go on. You did. Yeah. That is pretty cool.

Anyway, that's at the knitting factory in Brooklyn, uh, on Monday, June 7th from 5.30 to 7.30, right? Yes. And a concert will follow in the main, uh, space sponsored by the Onion Newspaper who are buddies now. Yeah. And I think that's like 10 or 12 bucks if you want to get into that and we'll be hanging out all night.

So. Yes. We'll be there. On Monday, June 9th, we're doing an all-star team trivia. Yes. Featuring us, Joe Randazzo, who is the editor of the Onion, and a couple of other famous type, uh, nerdy, famous people that are funny. Very nice.

But we can't commit to those just yet because we don't want to disappoint you in case they don't show up. I guess we should tell them where it is, right? You don't think they should just like drive around New York looking for us? Yes. Uh, yes. We have a hotel house, Josh, and that is in Brooklyn, New York, and, um, it goes from seven to nine as trivia starts at seven, doors at 630.

Right. So show up early and rub elbows with us and, uh, drink a adult beverage with us. And trivia starts at seven is game on for the next two hours and should be a really fun time. Right on, Chuck. Sounds good, huh? Yes. And we'll also put this on the Facebook page too, just so people know.

And if you're not, um, a fan of ours, or if you don't like our fan page on Facebook, go check it out. It's, um, we're on there a lot and actually Chuck is just killing it. You, well, talking to people, he walks around shaking hands, kissing babies, right? Yeah. Crazy. It's awesome. And we have a Twitter account, uh, S-Y-S-K podcast.

You're killing the Twitter. You're very funny on there. And, uh, one last thing, if you listen to our Guatemala podcast, part one and two, um, you know that we worked with an organization down there called Cooperative for Education. Yeah. And they have a text donation drive going. And if you aren't a super cheap skate, then you should give a measly $5 to get textbooks for life for a Guatemalan student.

Yeah. You don't even have to actually spend any money, just pay your bill plus five bucks at the end of the month. You'll never even know. Right. So you just text, uh, the word stuff, S-T-U-F-F, to two zero, two, two, two. You'll get a text back and it'll say, you sure? Or something like that.

And you text yes back. And there you go. Bada-boom, bada-bing. And, uh, what data and wireless rates apply maybe? Yes. They definitely do, uh, in certain cases. And if you live outside the United States, you, um, can go to the, uh, website coed.uccoeduc.org and you can donate there if you live outside of the United States.

Booyah. Worthy cause. Let's do listen to mailman. Did we do t-shirts? Uh, no. T-shirt contest is officially on, has been going on. It closes at the end of the month, May 31st at midnight. Yes.

And, um, Eastern time, right? Eastern time. You have to resubmit it once. You got to resubmit, uh, do a one-sided design, not on both sides. And that's pretty much only limitations at this point, except you have to be American. Yeah. It's crazy. Like you can't be a part of this.

Yeah. You have to be a bystander, an innocent bystander, we hope, but, um, yeah, a bystander if you're not American. Right. This is an American stuff you should know, t-shirt throw down. Yes. I love for it to be everybody, but it's, the laws of the earth is what I've been saying, and I can't win a contest in, um, Africa.

So. Well, Chuck's going to, uh, night school right now to study international law. So once he, uh, gets his, uh, master's, we will be holding contests elsewhere, right? Indeed. Uh, if you want to send us a listener mail, you just shoot it in an email to StuffPodcast at howstuffworks.com for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more how stuff works? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage brought to you by the reinvented

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