Earthquakes Drop Water Levels In Maine Wells and The Need To Preserve Dunes in Great Lakes

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Wells in Maine suddenly dropped when a series of small earthquakes fractured the continental shelf somewhere. It seems the geologically quiet East Coast is not so quiesent after all. Also Facti and Arthur, two of the readers of this blog, begin a crusade to save their favorite sand dunes. It seems scientists agree with them.

A series of small earthquakes defracted the rocks in Maine causing wells to drop.

LiveScience Staff

LiveScience.com Tue Oct 3, 5:45 PM ET
A minor earthquake that shook parts of Maine at 8:07 p.m. local time Monday caused water to drop 2.5 feet at a U.S. Geological Survey monitoring well.

Nearly 17 hours later, the water level was still dropping, scientists announced today.

Hydrologists call the change in the well “dramatic,” and said well-water users might notice changes in their drinking water.

When we were digging our well on this mountain, the drillers went down a whole 350 feet yet the water didn't have enough pressure. Then we hydrofracted the rock by injecting a high powered stream of water which made fissures in the rocks below. To our amazement and the riggers wonder was, the water then poured forth with such volume, it turned our well into an artesian well which still overflows today, ten years later.

The landmass on the upper East Coast is very old. One doesn't find dinosaur bones in the dense rock. And even though it is pretty geologically stable, there are earthquakes up here. An ancient faultline runs along the little stream less than a mile from my house. The Rensselaer Plateu rises in straight up in the west on the other side of the stream.

The St. Lawrence valley is an active fault zone and off of it lies assorted earthquake sites. It strikes me as rather odd that all the earthquakes we have been having lately are on the east side of the Mississippi divide. The Pacific plate has been very active yet California has been strangely quiet. Not that this is a good sign, it is the opposite.

The fact that the earth on the opposite side of the intense activity triggered by the Boxing Day Great Quake is now busy is a mystery but also makes one wonder what is going on here. One of the most violent quakes ever was in the earliest years of the 1800's when the New Madrid Fault rearranged the Mississippi River.

Arthur, one of my canine readers, and his manager have emailed me about the insidious plans to destroy the dunes in their community.

By JOHN FLESHER, Associated Press Writer Tue Oct 3, 7:32 PM ET
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - Known as Pigeon Hill, the Lake Michigan dune towered 30 stories high on the south side of Muskegon. Formed over thousands of years, it disappeared in three decades as its sand was mined for industrial use in the mid-20th century.

"You can only see Pigeon Hill in a museum now," said Tanya Cabala, an environmental consultant from Whitehall who has studied its history.

Michigan has regulated sand mining since then, although environmentalists want stronger controls. But Great Lakes dunes also face other threats, from invasive plant species to abuse by all-terrain vehicles, scientists and government officials said Tuesday.

Facti, an intreped explorer and sceptic and her dog, the Mighty Hunter, discovered a golf course is going to be built on the dunes in her neighborhood. They got on the case right away.

The attorney representing the golf course promoters and their government enablers claims that not "one grain" of sand will be moved to build their playground. Never one to believe everything I read, I climbed the dune - not easy - and like Natty Bumppo, scoured the terrain for signs of corruption.

Too much fun. The land underneath the grass is, um, sand. Essentially they want to take all the dunes, leaving the beach proper for when the golf course fails and they have to, oh, gee whiz, build more super duper luxury "housing units". Yes, they are referring to the residential part of their dream development as "housing units".

As we all know, people lie all the time and being sceptical pays off.

Sometimes one gets in big battles in what seems to be small matters but looking over all this carefully, one can see that every grain of sand does make a huge sand dune eventually. The wild birds in particular need a varied environment and golf courses have some big problems namely due to excessive mowing and the use of poisons and fertilizers as well as non-native grass species.

This is why preserving nature so the wide variety of lifeforms can live is so important for our own life forms. Good luck with your battles, Facti and Arthur!

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Comments

[D.F. Facti]

Oh, Elaine, thank you, and thank you for the Traverse City info. There isn't any more desirable land that is accessible by the fat cats and that is close to the big cities where the elite can move and shake. So, they're going after public parks and open space.

Art is appreciative, too, but he, as you know, is a conservative.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

I sat on your story for several days because I was looking for something to add, I knew something would come up!