Can humans start an earthquake?

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Chuck and Josh. We debated, this is Josh and Chuck. It's chucking Josh, now, dude, it's what do you mean now? Well, it was Josh and Chuck and then it became Chuck and Josh. I'm sure in the future will just keep roll rotating. It's like the wheel of time. All right. I just Josh and Chuck has a ring that I enjoy. How about Chosh, Chuck and Matt? Yeah, with special guest producer Matt. Jerry's not here to spank us when we air, no, which means we can get away with a lot of stuff.

Although I think we're self regulating these days. Yeah, we're doing pretty well. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. Uh, Chuck, Yes, you want to get into it. You remember the earthquake in May of two thousand and eight in China, Sechuan Province. Yeah, yeah, killed like eighty thou people, I think, right? Seven point nine, Yes, the old Richter scale, right, how we pronounced it, That's how you spoke to German. I just thought it'd be funny if we mispronounced like even things that everybody knows,

because we have a reputation for mispronouncing difficult things. All right, let's start doing it the Richter scale. Okay, well the on the Richter scale, squail, can we do that? Uh it hit? What did you say at seven point nine? Yeah? Thereabouts, and like I said, killed lady thousand people was an enormous, horrific earthquake, and um, very quickly, you know. I remember MPR was there because they were like covering the Olympics, so everybody went to Sechua instead because it was right

before the Olympics. Right, we were here, We were here. But MPR did like a month of coverage on this earthquake, like everybody was talking about it. One thing that flew under the radar that at least my radar, was that there were and still our allegations that the earthquake was actually um man made, at least hastened by a man made structure, specifically the you're pointing at me, the zipping zip zipping poo damn, something like that, pooping poo. Yeah,

that's something like that. Yeah, flee below my radar too. I had no idea about this. Did you see that? Like on a certain there's like tons of articles on it. They just got no play. Yeah. So, um, what we're talking about is something that's called reservoir induced seismicity, Yes, right, and to a certain degree in due size, misicity to a greater extent. I don't know what you just said. Not only reservoirs I got a couple of other nuggets. Yeah, chuck, chuck,

dug up some other man made earthquake phenomena. Right, Um, but let's well, let's start with reservoir and du seismicity, right, or let's start with damns. How about that? Well, that's a good place to start. Or should we start with earthquakes? Actually, if you want to know about earthquakes, go listen to our How Earthquakes Work podcast, which is pretty good. Did we do that? Yeah? Yeah, I'm getting old. Days are just kind of melting together. I was honestly thinking we

should do one on earthquakes. Yeah, we already did, remember the s waves? Oh yeah, yeah, sure, alright, So, um, we'll talk about dams instead. These things are, um, well, dams are getting bigger and bigger. Is our engineering prowess? Uh? Is not ours? But humaniter is getting better and better and our needs are growing. Right, So I think constructing a dam in the first place, what you're doing is you're just putting a wall up in front of a

river and letting the water back. Fell right, pretty easy. But by doing this number one, you're changing um, the river hydrology downstream e g. The people downstream are in big trouble. Um. But you're also you have to take into account the area around um the dam, what was normally once just dry land with a river running through it, and probably some villages. You know Lake lan Ear. I think there's no natural lake in Georgia. They're all man

made it from what I understand. That's what I understand too. But Lake Lanear specifically has a town beneath it. And when the um, when the reservoir lowers, decreases. Uh, you can see a gulf have any sixth time popping up out of it? Have you ever seen that? It's creepy? That is creepy. That's why. Also they can never find somebody who dies in likely near because they get caught up in like power lines or in a convenience store

or something like that. Shopping yeah, under the water, shopping dead. Yeah. Um. But around this area and what was what used to be dry land, there's also dirt and rock and oftentimes mountains sometimes fall lines. Because you want to use the natural geography of the area to hold this water. Right. You ever been to the Hoover Dam. I haven't. I've flown over it. Does that count. I got a good

gander of it at like ten thousand feet. Yeah, if you ever go this is I mean a lot of people drive over the Hoover Dam, or they stand on the edge of the Hoover Dam, like Bob Will suggests. But I suggest that if you're there, take the time to pay the dough it's like, I don't know how much it is tin bucks and go down and take the tour. Wow. It's my only my only tip tip

of the day. I've seen it on the TV. It's really cool looking and you can stand there and rbl at it, but when you get down on the guts of it is when you're really like whoa. Yeah. So it's a marvel of engineering, absolutely right, And like I said, it utilizes the surrounding geography to hold the water. Um. But when you do this, you're applying a lot of water that didn't used to be there to the surrounding

same mountains. Yea, And all of a sudden you have something that we call landslides, right, yes, And that's what's usually you think of. You don't think of earthquakes when you think of um, that kind of activity. You think of landslides. You want to tell them about the Italian landslide because you love to do the accents, but do it in a really somber tone. Well there, I'm not gonna do it an Italian accent. But it is one of the deadliest in history and it was in northern

Italy and sixty three and it killed people. An entire village is wiped out when four hundred million cubic yards of mountain rock fell into the reservoir. I'm not going to pronounce that the v damn. Yeah, it looks French. Yeah, well it's in the Alp so it's close to France. Yeah, and it basically created a tidal wave eight hundred and fifty six ft tall, right, So this um four hundred million cubic yards of rock goes into the reservoir, just

places all that water. And yeah, the the wave I read, this wave that was generated by it crested over the top of the damn. It washer than that. It was twenty It was equal to a twenty eight story building. Imagine that on top of the damn and it just came down crazy and washed villages away. You're you're just sitting there in Italy and sixty three enjoining your grappa, having a good time. Not for long now, but apparently it took full two minutes to get down there to

wipe out the village. How long two minutes from what I read, that's like the MUDs like in Guatemala, no warning. No, And there's also some in China that apparently have been pretty disastrous thanks to it. A damn there, the three gorgeous damn, which is pretty famous. Dam it's on the Yanks River, right, Yeah, they were kind of worried about that one. Yeah, and they kind of should be from what I understand. Uh As whenever just about any time they raise or lower the um the reservoir or when

they initially filled it, landslide started happening. And there was one in two thousand seven that buried a bus. I guess it just kind of caught him unawares. What a horrific death to be buried in a bus, but well, to be buried alive in any way, but bus would probably be badly bus You ever taking a bus trip? Yes, I would not want to bury a bus trip, Nor would I because you're like, I can't believe I'm surrounded by these people while I'm alive, you know. Yeah, not

to make light of it. No, when to come across as insensitive. No, so chuck. Um, these are just landslides we're talking about. That's that's a totally different you know, destabilizing the dirt that holds up mountain rock is totally different from an earthquake. Right. Indeed, so how do we get to uh, the reservoir induced seizedmicity? How do we how do we get to a dam creating an earthquake? Well, in the case of the one in China, um, the

Zipping Poo dam. It's fifty stories tall. It can store more than one billion cubic meters of water from the min Jong River. So all of a sudden you have a regular river and then all of a sudden it weighs you know, a billion cubic meters more. Well, that's not a weight, but you know what I mean. So that's gonna create some a lot more pressure on the ground beneath it. Right, there's a fault line there, then you're in big trouble. Yeah, and um, we don't really

know whether there are fault lines there. Um, when we're constructing dams. It turns out, apparently there is a survey in n by the World Bank that found that forty nine projects, like more than three quarters of them that were surveyed all had unexpected geology geological activity, right, And apparently it costs millions of millions to do a survey of an area and you may find that, yeah, there's

a fault line there that we didn't know about. So companies who build damns oftentimes don't want to know that whether or not there's a fault line there. I've seen that that not a lot of research goes in well, I don't want to say not a lot of research, but many times not enough research goes into the underground situations. Right. And for the three gorgeous um damn there were there. Actually it's built over two fault lines and they're just waiting for this thing to blow apparently, Yeah, and they

said it might be a big one too. So with the two thousand and eight earthquake, China kind of got into this issue of reservoir induce seismicity, and it's already kind of cloudy. It's kind of one of those um walks, like a duck scenarios, because you have um, you have increased seismic activity in areas as reservoirs are being filled, you have um earthquakes that that people weren't expecting, right obviously, but even geologists weren't expecting seismologists um with an epicenter

under the dam. Right, So it's like, yes, damns are creating earthquakes, um. But again there's a lot of money at stake. If people become more aware of r I s, which is what people in the NO call it, then people who live downstream from a dam are gonna want their houses earthquake proof, which is gonna raise the costs through the roof. And they're not gonna do that, right, And like I said, with China now and it's it's

become obviously scated even further. Yeah, because in a case of China, there's probably a lot of houses that need to be retrofitted. Well, not just that the the government's politically in the hot seat right now and the earthquake in two thousand and eight, they tried to distance themselves because it was a government project. And building a damn in and of itself is it's a very utilitarian pursuit.

If a dam can create an earthquake and kill people or their landslides, and that kills people because you're helping, you know, x number of people, Like the Zipping Pooh dam generates like sixty kilowatts kilowatt hours of electricity. Oh yeah, sure you do. But at the same time, so it's kind of like, Okay, well there's a bus full of people that just got buried, but we have all this electricity. So when you throw that in, when you throw the money in and then um, paper in the journal, uh,

the Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation. Do you get that it sounds like a it does? It concluded that people in other countries who were um affected by reservoir and in due seismicity from American built dams had legal grounds to see those people in the US for damages. Basically, there's a lot of people out there who are like rs doesn't exist, but it does. Yeah, uh. And you know it's not just the water pressure sitting on top

of these plates that can cause it. What also happens is the water seeps down in there and fills up all the little cracks. And if there's way more water doing this, then that can cause uh, fractures to become larger or to shift around, and that you know, that might be one of the reasons to right. And it

also lubricates, it doesn't it. It goes down to these faulans because you think about it, like you have tectonic plates, you have fault lines where the earth is basically sitting like just on the tiniest ledge of one plate over another, and if you get some water in there and loop it up, then they slip and you have an earthquake. It's called poor pressure, my friend. It's poor pressure is the fluid pressure in the pores and the fractures of the rocks, and um the acts against the weight of

the rocks. So when poor pressure is low, the imbalance of what they call it in situ earth. Have you ever heard that phrase? Uh doesn't mean like um stable bedrock or something like that sort of it's Latin egg. It can mean a bunch of different things, but in case of the Earth, it means uh. In the place is in water or oil that hasn't been extracted yet oh yeah, yeah yeah, or gas. Let's say, whatever is

down there, any kind of natural earth. UM. So the imbalance of the institute earth stresses UH will cause the occasional earthquake. And if the poor pressure is increased, then it takes a lot less of an imbalance for these to get out of whack. And one of the reasons that that might happen is if you inject something into the subsurface, or if you extract something from the subsurface,

like maybe oil or water or gas. Yea. And that all made sense because I've I've often posed the question does the earth need it's oil, Like, you know, we're extracting oil, but maybe it has a really vital function down there, maybe it's a lubricant. I kind of found out that that wasn't necessarily true that you know, if we pull out all the oil from me, well, we

can't pull out all the oil. I think it leaves about a third they they leave at least a third in all reservoirs because we just don't have the technology to get But what I what I gathered from researching this a little bit today is that it doesn't necessarily it's such a small amount still compared to the density of the earth that these like small empty pockets might make things move around and cause like some minor tremors, But it's not like we're going to have the big

one one day if we tap the oil out of the earth. But we also use like water injection technology to BINGO and that can cause an earthquake, right, Yeah, and that's when you you inject like steam or water or c O two to either move the oil around or heat it up make it more viscous, and that means it will flow to a channel where it's easier to tap it. Or they do that for water wells too,

to make water more readily available. I think there were some earthquakes and surprising earthquakes in Colorado in the nineties that had to do with natural gas drilling. Yeah. Well, you know the other thing they do is they inject waste water into the earth. I did not know that. I didn't either. I always wondered where it went. Well, a lot of they read assume we were all drinking it. Well, I think it's a certain amount we do, but there's way more wastewater than there are mouths to drink it.

So evidently they'll drill down into the earth and inject. They'll supposedly clean it. They supposedly they clean it. Yeah, I've never witnessed it. But why would they lie? Why would they lie? I don't know. I mean, who would lie when money is at stakes? So they inject the waste water back into the earth. And that's you know, hasn't create any problems thus far. Yeah, yet, who knows. Uh, there was I remember we talked about like carbon sequestration.

Uh once were we were talking about taking C O two, remember, capturing it from smoke stacks and then putting it into the and we were wondering, like, what what effect is that going to have? Who knows? Probably well, we'll all find out what when we do hit the big ones from removing oil and then injecting like carbon c O two into the earth, what happens. So many of these studies are all like, O, don't no, it's not doing anything.

But like I'm of the belief that holding a cell phone up to your brain it's gonna cause some damage. Another saying no, it doesn't. But we haven't studied anyone who's done it for thirty years every day, right, Yeah, it's a good point. And then I found like a little computer, you know, I know it's like d d D D D d D. I think we're gonna see some fallout from that in about years. Brother, you know, conger over it stuff. Mom never told you wrote it? Uh?

An article on cell phones making a sterile, keep it in your pocket, yeah, next to the boys. Yeah, I don't want to do that, so chuck. One more thing. We should say very specifically that even though people it seems like there is a consensus that r S does exist, right, yes, um, and there's a lot of people who want to downplay it.

Like the Chinese pointed out that prior to this earthquake that the in in such Uan in two thousand and eight, the biggest r a S linked earthquake happened in nineteen sixty seven in India and it was like six point five and they point that that was the biggest ever that was induced by a dam. So we're not entirely certain how how how big these things can be UM or how how much dams can contribute. But again, we don't really know what we're doing building dams either do

we mining too that can cause them? And I also read that UM building construction like that tower in Taipei, that that caused some minor earthquakes because it was so big. That's gotta put hair on your chest if you're the project manager of of of a project that causes earthquakes. Yeah, and we should also point out lastly dams can't create earthquakes all by themselves. They have to be a bunch of factors present. Like it has to be built on

a fault line. It has to be huge. The dam, I think, has to be at least a hundred meters high to create earthquakes that really register. But pretty much anytime you build a dam like around a fault line, seismic a activity increases as you fill it up. So it's gonna happen. Yeah, we're not anti damn. We should point that out. We love damns. Yeah, I guess that's it, right,

I think, so, I won't have anything else. All right, Well, if you want to read a little more about this and see some gripping pictures, you can type in humans and earthquakes. I think that'll probably bring this article up right. Probably, So this episode of stuff you should know. It's brought to you by go to Meeting the affordable way to meet with clients and colleagues for your free thirty day trial. Is it go to meeting dot com slash stuff And

this is a short one, chucklin't it. Yeah, I have some stuff to inject here at the end, and to our subsurface, we have some announcements about New York, right and T shirts. Yeah, New York. You know we're going to New York. We're gonna like throw our hat and do a little twirl in the middle of Times Square because we've made it a for all. Um, we're gonna be at the Knitting Factory. We're having a stuff you should know meet and greet, happy fans, happy hour, come

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it's pretty cool. Anyway. That's at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn on Monday, June seven, from five thirty seven thirty right, Yes, and a concert will follow in the main space, sponsored by The Onion newspaper. Who are buddies now? And I think that's like ten or twelve bucks if you want to get into that and we'll be hanging out all night,

so yes, we'll be there. Um And then Wednesday, June nine, we're doing an all star team trivia, yes, featuring us, Joe Randazzo, who is the editor of The Onion and End, and a couple of other famous type nerdy famous people that are funny. But we can't commit to those just yet because we don't want to disappoint you in case they don't show up. I guess we should tell them where it is, right, You don't think they should just

like drive around New York looking for it. Uh? Yes, it's at the Bellhouse, Josh, and that is in Brooklyn, New York. And um, it goes from seven to nine as as trivia start to seven. Doors at six thirty, So show up early and rub elbows with us and uh drink an adult beverage with us and trivia starts at seven. Is game on for the next two hours and should be a really fun time right on, Chuck sounds good, huh. And we'll also put this on the

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You're killing the Twitter. You're very funny on there. And Uh, one last thing, if you listen to our Guatemala podcast Part one and two, UM, you know that we worked with an organization down there called Cooperative for Education and they have a text donation drive going. And if you aren't a super cheap skate, then you should give AM easily five dollars five bucks to get textbooks for Life for Guatemalan student. Yeah, you don't even have to actually

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And that's pretty much only limitations at this point, except you have to be American. Yeah, it's crazy, like you can't be a part of this. Yeah, if you have to be a bystander, an innocent bystander, we hope, but um, yeah, a bystander if you're not Americans an American except you should know T shirt throw down, Yes, and we would love for it to be everybody. But it's that the laws of Earth, is what I've been saying. And I

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