Been to Blackpool many moon's ago (top spot for a night out), don't remember anything in the news about damage to property or loss of life, sad to think this clown probably went to UNI to study Journalism (such a waste), only to end up producing the same repetitive one eyed dribble, bm.
Nice video, shame about the song.
Blackpool rocked: how fracking triggers quakes
Date August 7, 2012 - 5:18PM
Documentary: Fracked off - US experience of fracking
Hydraulic fracturing may cause more earthquakes than previously thought, a new study of US gas drilling fields suggests.
A panel of seismic experts decided it was "highly probable" that the company's drilling was responsible for two quakes and 28 aftershocks in Blackpool
The "fracking" process involves injecting large volumes of water and chemicals underground to bring methane to the surface. It has long been associated with causing small underground tremors and occasionally with earthquakes that are noticed on the surface.
But the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found at least 59 minor quakes in the Barnett shale region in Texas, ranging from 1.4 to 2.5 in magnitude, that had not been reported to the US National Earthquake Information Centre. Advertisement
Researchers used 400 seismographs on the site for two years to build up a comprehensive picture of a fracking field. The number of earthquakes may have been increased by drilling in a region that already had some geological fault lines, the University of Texas researchers said.
An Australian drilling engineering and seismology expert, Mark Tingay from the University of Adelaide, said the findings added to what is already known about injecting fluid underground - whether during fracking for gas or drilling to release geothermal energy.
"What they're looking for is the threshold beyond which it would trigger a larger earthquake," Dr Tingay said. Hydraulic fracturing did cause many minor tremors, but almost all would not be felt by humans on the surface, he said.
The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association pointed to a separate University of Texas study that found "no documented cases of induced earthquake from hydraulic fracturing. Only one documented case of induced seismicity has been recorded globally, that occurring at Blackpool in northwest England, in 2011, and according to independent experts, the event resulted from a rare combination of geologic factors not likely to be encountered with any frequency in the future."
The study is a reference to gas drilling in the UK by a partly Australian-owned company, Cuadrilla Resources. A panel of seismic experts decided it was "highly probable" that the company's drilling was responsible for two quakes and 28 aftershocks in Blackpool.
Asked if earth tremors had been known to take place in Australia as a result of fracking, an APPEA spokesman said: "The answer to your question is 'no'."
Dr Tingay said many kinds of drilling and fluid injection had caused earthquakes in Australia, but they were so small people rarely noticed.
"It's wrong to say we don't cause earthquakes with oil and gas, because we know we do," he said. "We can theoretically just do that from agricultural water production as well. This study is saying that there's a higher frequency of earthquakes near some large injection sites.
The largest known quake thought to be caused by underground fluid injection in Australia was at a geothermal drilling site in South Australia's Cooper Basin, Dr Tingay said. That caused a local quake of magnitude 3.7, he said, though it had received little attention because it was in an insolated area.
(20min delay)