Posted on 07/03/2010 4:10:34 PM PDT by EBH
Do an experiment for me. Take a balloon, inflate it. Get two books and place one on each side of the balloon opposite each other. Now deflate the balloon and notice what happens to the books. The books shift towards each other.
The massive pressurized oil and methane reserve now blowing out south of the Louisiana coast is just like a the deflating balloon. As this reserve empties a huge cavern is being created under the gulf floor. Usually these caverns are back filled with seawater as the oil is removed to stop a catastrophic collapse and make extracting the oil easier. Unfortunately the BP blow out is not being equalized in this manner.
Could the shifting walls of the oil cavern cause the earthquake swarms in Arkansas? Will the quakes grow in magnitude as more oil and methane is released? Could the shifting wall of the oil cavern destabilize the New Madrid fault? How big of a tsunami would be created if the oil cavern collapses?
(Excerpt) Read more at survivalistnews.com ...
LOL Now I’m glad I didn’t hit the link.
“Good heavens, Habibi! Hold it in!!!”
Sorry. The medications wore off for a few hours there. I thought I was going to get a series on the Discovery Channel for a moment.
I’m better now.
Too funny! You have a unique imagination. Hmmmmm....I wonder who BO would sacrifice? A family member? Nah...the volcano would spit her back out.
:-)
She would make things worse, and we would go down the slippery slope to Environmental catastrophe all the more quickly! /s
But it would be great to recruit her! LOL.
YOU recruit her. She scares me.
She scares you? She is just all noise! Give her a garden, some plants,a set of weights, a man to beat around,and warm up the volcano!LOL.
BTW, you might want to check this thread out:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2546639/posts?page=9#9
Wow! Thanks for the head’s up.
I think it’s kinda like that global warming thingy. ;o)
No.
To explain: an oil reservoir is not a 'cavern', not a balloon, but the small void spaces left between grains of porous rock. The reservoir itself can be envisioned by taking a sack of marbles and dumping them in a glass. If you look, there is space between the marbles, and those spaces are interconnected. The marbles dont flaot when the glass is filled with water, but stick a straw in there and you can suck the water out.
On a smaller scale, the spaces between sand grains work the same way. On a larger scale, so does the reservoir of an oil or gas field, with innumerable smaller pores connected, filled with oil and gas. Remove the oil and gas, and while some settling may occur, there is no cavern to collapse, the contact between the grains that supported the caprock will continue to support it, because it was never one big void. The gas dissolved in the oil expands as the pressure is lowered by producing oil and fills the pore space nicely, but the grains in the rock do the heavy lifting, the oil and gas just fill the leftover space.
Notice, as you suck the water out of the glass full of marbles, the marbles don't collapse. Neither will the rock in the gulf.
oil is a naturally occurring substance that has leaked about 800,000 thousand gallons a day into the gulf of mexico through natural cracks in the floor of the gulf. It has done so for millions and millions of years.
comparing it to an ebola virus makes less sense than the earth quake.
Thank you!!
An awesome analogy, much better than I’ve seen. I knew FReepers would blow this one out!! (pun intended)
Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense.
Could the shifting walls of the oil cavern cause the earthquake swarms in Arkansas? Will the quakes grow in magnitude as more oil and methane is released? Could the shifting wall of the oil cavern destabilize the New Madrid fault? How big of a tsunami would be created if the oil cavern collapses?No. Next!
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There are swarms of small earthquakes in Arkansas and other states around the New Madrid fault zone all the time.
The innumerable factual inaccuracies of the original post seem to have been well-dealt with by others.
thx thx
Funny, Ive owned lots of horses but never had one deposit bullshit before.
ROBUST GUFFAWS....THX.
Best get out the door to church.
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