The most recent earthquake was recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey on Thursday between Springdale and Rogers. It measured a 2.3 on the Richter Scale. Residents however didn’t report feeling the quake.
On May 20, a 2.6 earthquake was recorded near XNA in Benton County. And 2.5 quake shook the same area on April 25th.
In Central Arkansas, 36 earthquakes have been reported since June 2. The largest was a 3.3 on the Richter Scale.
An Oil cavern....???
There are Oil Wells all over this earth....
I do not believe any one of them has ever encountered an Oil Cavern....
“Could the shifting walls of the oil cavern cause the earthquake swarms in Arkansas?”
Could be. Could be my septic tank is destabilizing the front range of Colorado. Could be Denver will slide down into Kansas.
Ya’ never know, but I certainly wouldn’t post any of my weird theories out in public. That would be REALLY weird.
The total amount of oil leaked to date has been compared to the volume of a cube 300 feet on a side.
That doesn’t sound like the sort of “huge cavern” that would cause earthquakes a thousand miles away, now does it?
The source of this report is slightly less than credible
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.
This whole story is basically quacky crap, but for the sake of argument ... let's see the proof that the quoted sentence is true.