Earthquakes, the Dummy Explanation

Pore spaces in sedimentary rock

The Antisocial Network's chief geologist, a one-time employee of Big Oil, usually finds the average person's complete lack of understanding of the oil business baffling as all get-out. Many people think, for instance, that not buying gasoline from BP stations hurts BP (it doesn't) or that oil comes from dead dinosaurs (it doesn't). And then there's the significant number of dumbasses who think oil is found in underground caverns – people like Vince Summers, last seen peddling his bull at PersonaPaper.com in "My Old Idea May Yet Prove True - Oil as Shock Absorber."

Vince's "old idea"? Apparently he looked at a hydraulic shock absorber and decided... well, we'll let you see what he decided:

"The removal of fluids from within the earth would create open spaces that should allow for geological shifting, that could be the source of earthquakes, sinkholes, tsunamis, and whatever else shifting does to the earth's surface."

Like lots of harebrained ideas, Summers' idiotic statement contains a tiny kernel of fact: the rapid removal of subsurface fluids, whether oil or groundwater, has been known to cause surface subsidence. This doesn't always happen, though, and when it does there aren't any earthquakes, sinkholes or tsunamis. The reasons are simple:

Fluid removal occurs too slowly and over too small an area for sudden "jerks" in the earth's crust. When fluids are removed, the spaces they occupied are either filled by other fluids or filled by "settling" of the rock around them. No "void spaces" are left. Those spaces filled with oil Vince talks about? they're not caverns or pools, they're tiny pores much smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Not exactly open spaces large enough to "allow for geological shifting," are they... This is the sort of scientific illiteracy that fills the staffers at the Antisocial Network with despair, and one of the reasons why people have dumbass ideas like these is obvious from Summers' last paragraph:

"God wouldn't be causing the earthquakes, since he does not try men with wicked things. So that leaves either natural occurrence (most unlikely) or catastrophes brought on man by his own foolish actions." Nuff said? We think so... and that's why we relish the thought of naming this bozo a Dumbass of the Day.

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SI - EARTHQUAKES