Skip to main content

Humans may have caused world's worst earthquakes

Some of the world's largest and most deadly recent earthquakes were not natural disasters at all but were caused by human activities such as mining, reservoir construction and oil and gas extraction, scientists say.
A global study of hundreds of quakes by Christian Klose, a consultant geophysicist, identified 92 large earthquakes likely to have been caused by humans.
Klose said that the Earth's crust is littered with geological faults under enormous tensions similar to those in a coiled spring.
When humans pile up vast masses of water or minerals on the surface, or extract them from beneath, the change in the weight of the overlying land can be enough to release that geological tension, causing an earthquake.
"The data specifically shows that human-made mass changes can advance the clock of natural seismic cycles and induce or trigger new earthquakes," said Klose.
According to the research, the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China, which had a magnitude of 7.9 and killed 80,000 people, was triggered by the construction of the Zipingu reservoir.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/humans-may-have-caused-world-s-worst-earthquakes/1207945/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Best IELTS and English language training institutions in Hyderabad

IELTS stands for International English Language Testing System. As the name implies it is basically an English test for testing the proficiency of the language in an individual.  Training for IELTS can be taken to pass the IELTS exam or to develop good english language skills. I am giving the training institute addresses for Hyderabad. The test system is jointly managed by the British Council,IDP education ltd and University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations and more than 1 million candidates are taking the exam all over the world. The test has two versions : 1. Academic 2. General training Academic  version is for people who plan to continue their higher education by enrolling in universities in countries like US,UK,Australia,Canada,New Zealand etc.The academic institutions in these countries consider the IELTS score as a criteria for the admission process. General training is mostly for immigration purposes in countries like Australia,New Zealand,Canada etc. It may also be u
9 comments
Read more

Communist party launches 'China Operating System' to oust iOS and Android

hina officials have launched a national operating system in an attempt to take back control of the country’s computer market from American companies such as Google and Apple. The software has been in development for more than a year, but has been released at a crucial time with revelations about US-led surveillance sparking fears over the integrity of American-designed software. Known simply as the China Operating System, or COS, the software can run on PCs, tablets and smartphones and has been based on the open-source Linux operating system. Chinese media say that the OS has been created “entirely independently” in order to provide better localization for a range of features – from Chinese-language keyboards, to integration with the country’s banks. At the launch of the event, one of the developers involved with the project reportedly criticized Western software , saying that Apple’s iOS was too closed, that Google’s Android OS suffered from fragmentation (ie, too many versi
Post a Comment
Read more