Quakes Increasing In Western US

Map from IRIS
April 25, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Now there is an earthquake cluster slightly to the west of Reno, Nevada as well as more microquake clusters off shore of Oregon. A reader kindly gave us some more links to quake data which show clearly that the junction of plates offshore of Oregon are very active and I feel this indicates the potential for a large plate movement. The tectonic plates in this region tend to move with quite violent jerks because it is three, rather than two plates. Also, land subsidence in the West is another ongoing story.

We can see from the maps put online by IRIS, the US geological survey, the US is undergoing a series of earthquake events. Below the radar here are the many smaller earthquake clusters. All of California is being shaken nearly constantly by micro earthquakes. But these are increasingly showing up elsewhere, nearby. We notice over time that the Asian/Australian side of the Rim of Fire has been tremendously active with many, many earthquakes that have ranged from 9+ mag on down. Up until this month, the North American side has been totally quiet. Only the smallest of tremors. But this wasn't due to our continent being geologically stable.

It was due to everything being frozen in place. The West USA is very, very geologically active. It is one of the more geologically active regions on earth. Like Italy and the Himalayas or Sumatra or the African Rift Valley, it is not a quiet zone but the exact opposite. So when it went totally silent as the other side of the planet erupted with lurches and violent changes, this simply meant, the West USA is building up energy for the next Big Push Northwards of the Pacific and Juan de Fucas plates. The Juan de Fucas plate is nearly totally under the North American plate by now. It has crawled northwards starting down by Central America over the last several million years. And since this is in opposition to the movement of the North American landmass, this meant that it moves northwards in very violent jerks. North America inches westward very slowly in comparison.

Today, there was yet another cluster of earthquakes to the east of California's Central Valley. Reno, Nevada, had a series of micro quakes at the 5 km level. I notice that there have been a number of quake clusters very near the surface, all of which are at key points to the western side of the Rocky Mountains.

The government has been releasing some good reports about the quake clusters off the shores of Oregon. They sent out a ship and loaded it with monitors to set on the sea floor. All my life, I have supported funding for geologists and their very, very important research just as we need better and better monitoring of the weather and astronomers who can track the universe for us. The deadliest forces we face are natural: meteorite strikes, variations in solar energy, solar storms, earthquakes and volcanoes, etc. One of the problems with the people who need a childish belief system is, the fundamentalists undermine these scientific observations of nature. They want a cardboard universe ruled by capricious gods who pick and choose who to protect.

We also have greedy people who want to ignore or misunderstand natural processes just like they willfully ignore the truth and reality of money making. They gain personal power and wealth by building rickety housing right on top of major fault lines or next to active volcanoes. Mother Nature laughs at this but the victims tend to be the poor people who are conned into buying property and then living in fatal situations.

2008 Oregon Offshore Earthquakes:

4/24/2008 Update:
R/V Wecoma returns to Newport. 11 CTD casts are being analyzed for final results in NOAA Vents laboratories. Hydrophone remains on seafloor to continue monitoring seismic activity. Figure 1 (below) updated to show final cruise track and seismicity at both sites. Northern Gorda seismicity histogram chart and time vs. latitude plot now available.

Click here for a movie showing how the earthquake cluster began off shore from Oregon;

It is worth while to watch these little movies. They show how the quakes suddenly start and then rattle onwards.

Click here for the Gordo cluster of earthquakes that are south of the first quakes:

Queen, Arizona, fissure warning tire.

Now on to the business of water extraction out West and how it is increasing subsidence which I fear ends up causing other greater geological problems. The abuse of water out West is legendary. Water use is far above the sustainable levels Nature allows. More and more people pour into the dry West seeking to live water-logged lives as if they are living in wet England or Northern Europe. The lifestyle of desert people is disregarded. Instead of dry toilets, we have water flush systems, just for example. All my life, when I grew up out there and beyond, I have warned that this is totally inappropriate for the region. Arizona was named 'dry area' for a good reason! Our ancestors considered the Great Plains to be a desert and the Arizona desert to be hell. But during the Great Depression, the government built giant Hoover Dam. And the west burst into flower. But we knew this was temporary. As more and more dams were built, cities also pumped water out of the earth below.

When my great granddaddy rode his calvary horse about Arizona chasing after Apache raiders, desert grasses grew half the year. I remember when we got hay from farmers in my own childhood. But today, the desert is amazingly dry. The water table that supported many a stream like the Santa Rita or the Tanque Verde has collapsed so far down, these year-round sources of water in my mother's youth are dry as bones and only flow during storms and that, only for a few hours.

I remember my own childhood when they still flowed and we used to build rafts and pole up and down the streams in winter.

Hazardous Cracks Running Through Arizona
Ray Harris and M. Lee Allison

The fissures were not news, however, to geologists. For more than 40 years, geologists have warned people about the hazards of earth fissures in Arizona, but until recently the warnings often went unheeded. In the past, earth fissures were considered an interesting phenomenon, but because they occurred mostly in undeveloped areas where few people lived, they were not perceived as a problem. But with the population expanding in recent years into areas known to have fissures, the potential for damage to property has increased, particularly with old fissures being filled in, concealing the potential risk.

New residents may be completely unaware that earth fissures lurk below their yards or under their homes, but with new mapping efforts and education, short-term solutions are possible. The issue today is less a problem of earth fissures forming where people have built houses than it is of people building houses on or near fissures without knowing it. Making people aware of the issue is the first step. In the long run, however, people may need to change their groundwater usage habits to curb the problem.

Earth fissures occur not only in Arizona, but also in other basins where the groundwater table has dropped precipitously due to overpumping. Fissures are a serious problem in the Las Vegas area, occur in southern Utah, California and western Texas, and have been recently reported in the small province of Aguascalientes in Mexico, where 200 homes and a hospital are reported damaged.

An earth fissure at the surface results from large quantities of soil or sediment being washed down into a crack that may initially be only a few centimeters wide, but a hundred meters or more deep and a kilometer or more in length. The longest fissure zone mapped in Arizona has a length of more than 11 kilometers. The condition that leads to the fissures is sinking land.

All over the West including California, of course, land is subsiding. California pumps water INTO the earth to keep this from getting worse, but this is yet more water taken from overtaxed river systems. Salmon fishing is collapsing due to the change in river flow rates and temperatures due to this meddling in water tables. The rise and fall of the land due to water use is so striking, it is making it more difficult for geologists to track earthquakes, for example. The land heaves and sighs.

Las Vegas Valley: Land Subsidence and Fissuring Due to Ground-Water Withdrawal

John W. Bell
Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology

Rapidly growing populations in the semiarid to arid regions of the southwestern United States require water. The water is used not only for basic needs (drinking, sewage systems, etc.), but also to maintain lifestyles transferred from wetter areas of the country (suburban lawns, golf, backyard swimming pools). These uses can be met either by purchases of surface water in an already over-allocated water-supply system (e.g., the Colorado River) or, most readily, by tapping ground water. However, ground-water withdrawal can adversely affect the sedimentary deposits that fill typical ground-water basins in the desert. These effects include differential compaction, reactivation of old faults, and surface fissuring, and can have considerable impact on human infrastructures

In Arizona and Nevada, this drop in the land is more problematic. It causes the earth to flatten out more and more and compress more and more. So less and less water can accumulate even in wet years. I did a lot o digging in Arizona as well as the Northeast USA. Up here, the land is riddled with water channels. This is why we have 'spring'. Literally, the water springs out of the sponge-like earth in spring as the frozen ground melts. One can actually see the channels if you carefully cut away a hillside.

In the dry deserts, the ground has far fewer such holes. It never freezes but it has to let water soak in more like a heavy towel than a sponge. And if it is totally dry, the caliche which is the mineral side effect of water soaking in and leaving lots of mineral content behind, is more like cement. This forces water to run downhill rather than soak in. Thus the mighty floods. The opening of cracks during floods shows that the water is very desperate to find some way into the soil.

Pumping of groundwater spurs surge in earth fissures

The number of earth fissures spreading across Southern and Central Arizona due to excessive water pumping is approaching 300, a top state geologist said Monday.
The Arizona State Geological Survey's office released maps showing that earth fissures are proving an increased safety risk to homeowners, as development expands into areas where fissures date back to the 1940s or '50s and in some cases to the 1920s.

Authorities have warned for decades that continued land subsidence from groundwater pumping can open up huge fissures. The warnings have increased in intensity in recent years as more homes are built atop old fissures, particularly in rapidly growing Pinal County between Tucson and Phoenix.
*snip*
Joan Etzenhouser of the Queen Creek area first thought the cracks on her property were "just part of the landscape" when they started to appear in 2004 and 2005, one to two years after she moved into the home.
Then, in August 2005, heavy rains left behind openings in three fissures, one running under her home and all three running across a wash.

Etzenhouser is suing the real estate agent and family that sold her and her husband the home on the grounds that they didn't disclose the fissure problem.

"I'm angry. I'm frustrated. I feel like I trusted people … the owner that sold me the home had to have known, known that there were weird things on this property other than scorpions and coyotes," said Etzenhouser, who lives on 3.3 rural acres.

Realtor John Richins, who represented the family that sold this home, declined to discuss the suit except to say that there were no fissures at the time the ground was sold: "I'm 66 years old. I've been a Realtor 25 years and I've never been sued in my life until now."

In Arizona as well as the entire West, basic weather and geological systems are studiously ignored when builders are given permits. So they build houses on flood plains that get totally destroyed in the inevitable 50 or 100 year floods. They build on fault lines. They build where there isn't enough water. They built too much and too many where it can't be supported by natural conditions. They love to ignore things. The West's landscape isn't very forgiving. Now, there are no more farms in West Tucson, there are no canals flooding orchards in Scottsdale like where I used to swim as a child. The green revolution there is turing into a Dust Bowl nightmare. It takes time but the green golf courses that dot the desert are doomed.

Most of the realtors out West should be sued. And the builders. And the politicians. And the voters who wanted everyone to ignore reality. Reality always wins in the bitter end.

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Comments

[B.A.]

So much political and economic phenomena gets deftly linked in this blog, that I read about quake activity and my mind sees geopolitical links. Maybe it's just me, but I hope we're not looking for a chapter of the book of Revelations: seas of blood red ink, the Earth shaking... I guess it's nice that things have a meaning and a direction, even if it's a terrible one. I'm pretty sure though, that the tectonic plates don't punish us for keeping interest rates too low, bailing out bankers or even for polluting... So I guess an overdue earthquake would come even in the most Utopian alternative political & economic universe we could imagine.

The only connection I see is that we're better with a resilient economy with plenty reserves, albeit a slower growing one. And solid homes, built away from seismic areas.

[Blunt Force Trauma]

All the seismic activity....

Nibiru? But it's effects are not due for another 5 years. Then we're F'd.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-3RLx_4Y5Y

[blues]

I have read in more than one geology article that when water is extracted from an aquifer, and the water level of the aquifer drops, the surface of the land above becomes much drier. I figure it will take another Ice Age to recharge the vast Ogallala aquifer in the West. So that means the West will go from being merely arid, to being a total desert. And a hell of a lot of farmland will become unusable.

They seem to be finding new fault lines in California on a regular basis. The entire West Coast seems to be poised for big quakes. I read that just one small quake could cut off all water in Southern California instantly! Yellowstone has been looking shaky, too. If that supervolcano erupts, people in the eastern states will probably be downwind of the dustclouds, not California. So nowhere is very safe. But I certainly wouldn't want to be on the West Coast.

Silly young people are still moving to Arizona and Nevada, though! Maps show that West Virginia is the pollution center of the nation. All in all, New England's not so bad.

[Blunt Force Trauma]

More Nibiru/Eris/Planet X

Interesting...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AmdazwAcgw&feature=related

[Raymond in Niagara]

Years before the housing bust, James Howard Kunstler talked about the levels of "hallucinated wealth" in America. That phrase stuck with me and now we see, the hallucination is clearing.

Kunstler's other prediction is that the cities of the Southwest would "dry up and blow away." I expect that will happen too.

Happy Long Emergency everybody.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

I figured that out long ago. This is because of rampant water wastage out west even when Tucson had just 75,000 people. It is now well over a million. I remember Scottsdale when it was nearly all rural. Less than 15,000 people. This is so unsustainable.

[Blake K]

Mexico will get the southeast back, and high time.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2008/04/mexico-reconque.html

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

All borders are fluid. They change over history nearly nonstop.

[Blake K]

Sorry, southwest, should never post that time of night.

[Ed-M]

The New Madrid fault is also acting up, lately. The Juan de Fuca fault off of Oregon had another small one. And the Reno quakes made the mainstream media.

As Bette Davis as Margo Channing said, "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride."

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

The entire west is very shaky right now. More so than any time in the last 5 years.