Natural disasters are often not natural
Natural disasters are often not natural disasters, but are in fact human disasters. Discuss this statement in relation to seismic events.
The word ‘natural’ indicates that humans have not caused the disaster. However, human activity can certainly interfere with nature, which in turn may either cause a natural disaster or make its effects much worse. Earthquakes can affect people in many different ways in countries all over the world. They are a product of intense seismic activity where plates are interacting, at a destructive of transform faults, particularly leading to a build up of tension below the Earths surface. When this tension is released the buildings, bridges, pipes etc which lie in the line of the seismic waves can often not withstand the force and strain of the earthquakes and can potentially harm people. However is it the people’s fault that the earthquake occurred in the first place?
Earthquakes induced by human activity have been documented in a few locations in the YSA, Japan and Canada. The cause was injection of fluids into deep wells for waste disposal and secondary recovery of oil, and the use of reservoirs for water supplies. Most of these earthquakes however were minor. The largest and most widely known resulted from fluid injection at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado. For decades scientists have been researching induced seismicity, or how human activity can cause earthquakes. Such a link gained attention in the early 1960s when hundreds of quakes were recorded in Colorado after the Army began injecting fluid into a disposal well.
There are many ways human activity can trigger earthquakes. In the 1930s for example, the construction of Hoover Dam in Arizona unleashed a burst of seismic activity in the vicinity that reached a magnitude of 5 on the Richter scale. Geothermal- energy projects have been known to make the ground shake. This process involves pumping pressurised water a mile into the Earth, then sucking up the
The word ‘natural’ indicates that humans have not caused the disaster. However, human activity can certainly interfere with nature, which in turn may either cause a natural disaster or make its effects much worse. Earthquakes can affect people in many different ways in countries all over the world. They are a product of intense seismic activity where plates are interacting, at a destructive of transform faults, particularly leading to a build up of tension below the Earths surface. When this tension is released the buildings, bridges, pipes etc which lie in the line of the seismic waves can often not withstand the force and strain of the earthquakes and can potentially harm people. However is it the people’s fault that the earthquake occurred in the first place?
Earthquakes induced by human activity have been documented in a few locations in the YSA, Japan and Canada. The cause was injection of fluids into deep wells for waste disposal and secondary recovery of oil, and the use of reservoirs for water supplies. Most of these earthquakes however were minor. The largest and most widely known resulted from fluid injection at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado. For decades scientists have been researching induced seismicity, or how human activity can cause earthquakes. Such a link gained attention in the early 1960s when hundreds of quakes were recorded in Colorado after the Army began injecting fluid into a disposal well.
There are many ways human activity can trigger earthquakes. In the 1930s for example, the construction of Hoover Dam in Arizona unleashed a burst of seismic activity in the vicinity that reached a magnitude of 5 on the Richter scale. Geothermal- energy projects have been known to make the ground shake. This process involves pumping pressurised water a mile into the Earth, then sucking up the