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Fracking operations triggered 100 quakes in a year
REX/David McHugh
UPFRONT
The fracking fracas PROTESTS against proposed fracking operations in England culminated this week with the arrest of Caroline Lucas (pictured), a Green Party member of parliament, for refusing to cooperate with police during a demonstration. Meanwhile, the latest geophysical research concludes that over 100 quakes were triggered in a single year of fracking-related activities in Ohio. Lucas was among a handful of demonstrators arrested during a protest at a site in West Sussex where oil and gas exploration firm Cuadrilla aims to sink a conventional oil well as a prelude to possible fracking operations. No permission has yet been given for fracking. The Ohio quakes, centred around Youngstown, were triggered by the disposal of wastewater from fracking
operations in neighbouring Pennsylvania rather than by hydraulic fracturing itself. As more and more wastewater was injected into a deep well, the water pressure in the rock rose and triggered 109 small quakes between January 2011 and February 2012. The largest had a magnitude of 3.9 (Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, doi.org/nh5). Quakes are not the only reason that fracking is controversial. There are concerns that the chemicals added to fracking water may contaminate groundwater reservoirs. However, geologists at the British Geological Survey say that groundwater reservoirs usually lie thousands of metres above the rocks that are fracked in well-managed operations, making contamination unlikely.
–Refusing to cooperate–
Stellar legacy IT’S official: the king of planethunters is dead. After months of frenetic rescue efforts, NASA announced on 15 August that the Kepler space telescope has ended its mission to find other Earths. But you haven’t heard the last
“Kepler’s bounty of star data has now given us a better way to find new Earths in the galaxy” of Kepler. More than two years’ worth of data still need inspecting, which could yet reveal an Earth twin or other surprises. The latest find in the Kepler data is a way to improve planet surveys, using the twinkle of an alien sun. Kepler was designed to spot transits, periodic dips in brightness that indicate a planet has passed in front of its star. Its vigil required exquisite targeting precision, but key parts of its steering system are now broken. What Kepler has already seen is still proving useful, though. When a planet transits a star, the amount of light it blocks can be 6 | NewScientist | 24 August 2013
used to calculate its size. That can help to pinpoint whether it is rocky like Earth or gassy like Jupiter, provided the star’s size is known. Current techniques to determine this give crude results or only work on brighter bodies. So Fabienne Bastien of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and colleagues used Kepler data to watch subtle flickers in starlight caused by convection in hot stellar plasma. The team found that bigger, more bloated stars flicker more (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature12419). This flicker could be used to gauge the sizes of 50,000 stars already studied by Kepler, they say. How will that affect the search for an Earth-sized world? Kepler’s principal investigator William Borucki expects the current pool of candidates to shrink. He suspects we may have been underestimating the size of stars, and therefore the planets that they host, so many worlds currently deemed “Earth-like” may turn out to be too big. “There is a significant chance that star sizes will increase when we have a more accurate method,” he says.
Organ harvest IF YOU go to China for an organ transplant, the organ may well have come from an executed prisoner. Not for much longer, perhaps. China has announced that it will phase out the practice from November, when hospitals licensed for transplantation will stop using organs harvested from executed prisoners. “I am confident that before long all accredited hospitals will forfeit the use of prisoner organs,”
Huang Jiefu, who heads the health ministry’s organ transplant office, told Reuters. Maria Fiatarone Singh, from the University of Sydney, Australia, says the announcement is little reason for optimism. “It’s very clear that what’s been happening is that people are being executed to order,” she says. China passed legislation in 2006 to stop organ trafficking, but Fiatarone Singh says it did nothing until 2010, when a pilot organ-donation programme was set up to recruit non-prisoners.
Secret clean-up of nuclear stash IT IS always good to learn that the world has become a safer place – especially when the danger was a warren of unsecured tunnels containing enough plutonium to make dozens of nuclear bombs. The radioactive material was at Semipalatinsk in east Kazakhstan – a former nuclear test site where numerous birth defects have been reported. Credit for the 17-year clean-up goes to US and former Soviet nuclear weapons scientists
who convinced governments to back them. The US footed much of the $150 million bill, but project details were secret. The operation is described in a report released on 15 August by Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Co-author Eben Harrell suggests that cooperation between scientists could help secure other hazardous sites, such as France’s nuclear test range in the Algerian Sahara.
UPFRONT
The fracking fracas PROTESTS against proposed fracking operations in England culminated this week with the arrest of Caroline Lucas (pictured), a Green Party member of parliament, for refusing to cooperate with police during a demonstration. Meanwhile, the latest geophysical research concludes that over 100 quakes were triggered in a single year of fracking-related activities in Ohio. Lucas was among a handful of demonstrators arrested during a protest at a site in West Sussex where oil and gas exploration firm Cuadrilla aims to sink a conventional oil well as a prelude to possible fracking operations. No permission has yet been given for fracking. The Ohio quakes, centred around Youngstown, were triggered by the disposal of wastewater from fracking
operations in neighbouring Pennsylvania rather than by hydraulic fracturing itself. As more and more wastewater was injected into a deep well, the water pressure in the rock rose and triggered 109 small quakes between January 2011 and February 2012. The largest had a magnitude of 3.9 (Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, doi.org/nh5). Quakes are not the only reason that fracking is controversial. There are concerns that the chemicals added to fracking water may contaminate groundwater reservoirs. However, geologists at the British Geological Survey say that groundwater reservoirs usually lie thousands of metres above the rocks that are fracked in well-managed operations, making contamination unlikely.
–Refusing to cooperate–
Stellar legacy IT’S official: the king of planethunters is dead. After months of frenetic rescue efforts, NASA announced on 15 August that the Kepler space telescope has ended its mission to find other Earths. But you haven’t heard the last
“Kepler’s bounty of star data has now given us a better way to find new Earths in the galaxy” of Kepler. More than two years’ worth of data still need inspecting, which could yet reveal an Earth twin or other surprises. The latest find in the Kepler data is a way to improve planet surveys, using the twinkle of an alien sun. Kepler was designed to spot transits, periodic dips in brightness that indicate a planet has passed in front of its star. Its vigil required exquisite targeting precision, but key parts of its steering system are now broken. What Kepler has already seen is still proving useful, though. When a planet transits a star, the amount of light it blocks can be 6 | NewScientist | 24 August 2013
used to calculate its size. That can help to pinpoint whether it is rocky like Earth or gassy like Jupiter, provided the star’s size is known. Current techniques to determine this give crude results or only work on brighter bodies. So Fabienne Bastien of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and colleagues used Kepler data to watch subtle flickers in starlight caused by convection in hot stellar plasma. The team found that bigger, more bloated stars flicker more (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature12419). This flicker could be used to gauge the sizes of 50,000 stars already studied by Kepler, they say. How will that affect the search for an Earth-sized world? Kepler’s principal investigator William Borucki expects the current pool of candidates to shrink. He suspects we may have been underestimating the size of stars, and therefore the planets that they host, so many worlds currently deemed “Earth-like” may turn out to be too big. “There is a significant chance that star sizes will increase when we have a more accurate method,” he says.
Organ harvest IF YOU go to China for an organ transplant, the organ may well have come from an executed prisoner. Not for much longer, perhaps. China has announced that it will phase out the practice from November, when hospitals licensed for transplantation will stop using organs harvested from executed prisoners. “I am confident that before long all accredited hospitals will forfeit the use of prisoner organs,”
Huang Jiefu, who heads the health ministry’s organ transplant office, told Reuters. Maria Fiatarone Singh, from the University of Sydney, Australia, says the announcement is little reason for optimism. “It’s very clear that what’s been happening is that people are being executed to order,” she says. China passed legislation in 2006 to stop organ trafficking, but Fiatarone Singh says it did nothing until 2010, when a pilot organ-donation programme was set up to recruit non-prisoners.
Secret clean-up of nuclear stash IT IS always good to learn that the world has become a safer place – especially when the danger was a warren of unsecured tunnels containing enough plutonium to make dozens of nuclear bombs. The radioactive material was at Semipalatinsk in east Kazakhstan – a former nuclear test site where numerous birth defects have been reported. Credit for the 17-year clean-up goes to US and former Soviet nuclear weapons scientists
who convinced governments to back them. The US footed much of the $150 million bill, but project details were secret. The operation is described in a report released on 15 August by Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Co-author Eben Harrell suggests that cooperation between scientists could help secure other hazardous sites, such as France’s nuclear test range in the Algerian Sahara.