Silly, but....

Chad, the Elder, at Fraters Libertas, imagines a conversation at the Minn. Star Tribune in which people are trying to find a way to blame the tsunami on Bush.

Could we blame it on nuclear tests? How about the infrasound waves the Navy's been testing? Could global warming have changed the way the oceans press on faults? Something? Anything???

I recall a news piece some decades ago. I believe it was a small town in Colorado that had taken to pumping liquid industrial waste down a deep well. They started getting earthquakes. It turned out the waste was working its way into a fault, and lubricating it. This caused a swarm of minor quakes, which ended only when they, at great expense, pumped the stuff back out.

It occurs to me that we might want to consider doing more of that.

Consider: A magnitude 4 quake is really nothing around here. Southern California building codes and the fact that people know a quake will come along and shake stuff off of shelves means we don't take much damage at all from quakes that wimpy.

Since the Richter scale is logarithmic, each increase of one unit equals a ten-fold increase in the energy released. A Richter 5 quake will release 10 times the energy of a Richter 4 quake, a Richter 6 quake 100 times, and a Richter 7 quake 1000 times the energy.

Suppose you lubricate a fault, and it starts throwing off one Richter 4 earthquake every day. We'd get used to that pretty quickly. But in 100 days (a little over 3 months), it would release energy that would otherwise have resulted in a magnitude 6 quake. After 1000 days, a little under 3 years, we've dissipated enough energy to prevent one magnitude 7 quake. A little over 27 years is enough to use up the energy of one magnitude 8 quake, and if we'd had 274 years of magnitude 4 quakes on that fault off Sumatra, the energy of last week's quake would have dissipated harmlessly.

Of course, anyone attempting this would be liable for lawsuits every time a heavy quake happened, even if their equipment was nowhere near the fault involved.

(Better still – if there were some way to tap that energy to power our generators...)