h a l f b a k e r yThe embarrassing drunkard uncle of invention.
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Every hundred years of so, perhaps we should face the inevitable earthquakes on our own terms, by initiating them with properly placed explosives. The housing stock probably needs replacing that often anyway, and its as good an excuse for a global holiday in the country as any. Could be combined with
Jubilee debt extinguishing - what you owed money on might not survive anyway. Better use for those old nuclear weapons than war, too.
Wells and quakes
http://www.kmbz.com...-in-Arkansa/9392252
As mentioned in an annotation [Vernon, Mar 15 2011]
Tsar Bomba
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
Stand well back ... [8th of 7, Mar 15 2011]
[link]
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Good idea. It's better to set off the nuclear explosions to cause the earthquake, than have the earthquake set off the nuclear explosions. |
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If we could actually initiate earthquakes, we'd do it before the fault pressure actually built up to destructive levels. |
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What's this "we" ? You might, but we certainly wouldn't ... |
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This (or something like it) has been proposed in many science fiction stories, in some cases to mitigate large earthquakes by releasing little bits every now and then, in other cases to fuse the tectonic plates permanently to stop them shifting altogether. Sorry I don't have any references or links. |
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Another way to precipitate controlled earthqaukes might
be
to pump lubricant into the fault. I vaguely recall that
being proposed for California. |
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The
objection was, I think, that it would only really be a good
idea if you started doing it right after all or most of the
stress had been relieved (which might not happen even
after
a really big earthquake). Otherwise, you might produce an
earthquake which was no smaller -- but was a whole lot
sooner -- than the one you were trying to prevent. |
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Which
might also apply to precipitating earthquakes with
explosions. |
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Years and years ago I read that small quakes have been triggered by wells tapping deep groundwater. ALSO, it was indicated that if water was injected into the deep ground, that could trigger quakes, too. |
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So right then and there I came up with the idea of drilling deep wells all along a fault line, and deliberately pumping water out, then back down, to sort-of-constantly "lubricate" the fault line, allowing constant small quakes to take place (meaning that no large quakes would occur). |
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The problem is that when you START doing this, you could trigger a big quake, and then get sued. Alas. There are plenty of idiots who think it is better to have a magnitude-9 later than a magnitude-7 today. |
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Logically, though, the time to start is right after a major quake happens, start drilling those wells! |
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The scale of those earthquake causing things (plate tectonics) is immensely larger than anything man can hope to fabricate. |
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The scale of a 25 ton block is immensly larger than anything a man can hope to lift. Yet stonehenge still got built. |
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The trick is not the brute application of force, but knowing where and how to apply a much more limited amount. Which we don't yet, admittedly. |
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//Better use for those old nuclear weapons// |
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Lex Luthor beat you to it. |
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// immensely larger than anything man can hope to fabricate // |
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There is no theoretical upper limit to the yield of a fusion weapon. |
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According to The Web, a magnitude 9 earthquake releases
something like 2 billion gigajoules of energy, or equivalent of
500 million tons of TNT, or 2 million Hiroshima bombs. Of
course, we have much better bombs nowadays. |
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In the 1960's the USSR developed a (max yield) 100 Megatonne fusion weapon, which was air-portable; so just five of those would be the same as your 'quake. |
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Such large weapons are not now considered useful, either strategically or tactically, but the technology to build them still exists. |
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