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Volume of fracking fluid pumped underground tied to Canada quakes (MP 2)

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Volume of fracking fluid pumped underground tied to Canada quakes (MP 2)

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Fracking has long been a hot topic in the environmental world. Of recent, Canada has experienced earthquakes and now, scientists are giving blame to the amount of fracking fluid that is injected into a well. Fracking consists of digging a hole in the Earth's surface in order to obtain before a high-pressure water mixture is pumped inside to release the gas inside. This then allows the gas to flow up towards the top of the well for workers to harvest. Over time, specifically three years, the fracking in Canada has become more and more evident with more wells and mature operations. During these three years, as operations have become more intense, the volume of the liquid injected into the fracking wells have increased exponentially. And once the volume reached  10,000-cubic- meters, it beings to trigger earthquakes. Before, scientists still had questions on why the earthquakes were occurring, but with this new evidence from their study, there is ways to stop the "natural" disasters from happening.

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Fracking wells should not go to 11. Instead, turning down the volume - that is, of water pumped underground to help retrieve oil and gas - may reduce the number of earthquakes related to hydraulic fracturing.

The amount of water pumped into fracking wells is the No. 1 factor related to earthquake occurrence at Fox Creek, a large oil and gas production site in central Canada, researchers report January 19 in Science. An injection of 10,000 cubic meters of fluid or more at a well appears to trigger a quake.

Fox Creek sits atop the Duvernay Formation, a sedimentary layer rich in oil and gas. Before December 2013, the area was earthquake-free. Since then, hundreds of earthquakes have shaken the region; most were below magnitude 4, but a magnitude 4.8 quake in 2016 temporarily shut down operations.

Previous investigations revealed that fracking well injections at the site were triggering earthquakes on an underlying fault system. But mysteries remained: For example, why didn't the quakes didn't start until almost three years after fracking activities began in 2010?

Ryan Schultz of the Alberta Geological Survey in Edmonton and his colleagues compared the timing and location of the earthquakes with fracking activity at 300 wells in the region.

An analysis of rates of injection, fluid pressure and fluid volume for the wells closest in proximity to the quakes revealed that, at this site, only volume was linked to the quakes. A previous study has linked the rate of wastewater disposal injections to seismic slip ( SN: 7/11/15, p. 10).

As for the three-year delay, the authors say, fracking well injections tend to increase in volume over time as operations mature. So once the injection volumes reached that 10,000-cubic- meter threshold, the earthquakes began.

Shakeup

Although fracking near Fox Creek began in 2010, the region only began to get earthquakes (red circles) in late 2013. Researchers say that's because the volumes of fluid pumped into the wells (vertical gray lines) were increasing over time. By late 2013, the total volume pumped into some close clusters of wells had reached at least 10,000 cubic meters (or 104 m3), triggering quakes. Most of the earthquakes were below magnitude 4, but a large quake in early 2016 temporarily stopped fracking operations.

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Volume of fracking fluid pumped underground tied to Canada quakes

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Fracking wells should not go to 11. Instead, turning down the volume - that is, of water pumped underground to help retrieve oil and gas - may reduce the number of earthquakes related to hydraulic fracturing. The amount of water pumped into fracking wells is the No.

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Warming Ocean Water is Turning 99% of these Sea Turtles Female (MP2)

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Warming Ocean Water is Turning 99% of these Sea Turtles Female (MP2)

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It may seem like an astounding, and even fake, news headline, but it is indeed true. The warming ocean waters in Australia's Great Barrier Reef has caused the eggs of pregnant female sea turtles to be female. When a green sea turtle lays an egg, the embryo determines its sex by the temperature the sand is at the time it is incubated. Although, even with this information it is still hard for scientists to determine the exact imbalance of the population. In order to get this data, the scientists tested the hormone levels in turtles along the Great Barrier Reef to find their sex. After, they used their genetic data to conclude what beach the individuals had originated from. But, Michael Jensen an expert from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says that this occurrence is nothing he wouldn't see out of the realms of reality. This news is still troubling because in the long run, scientists are unsure of how harmful this event will be on the entire population of Sea Turtles.

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Warming waters are turning some sea turtle populations female - to the extreme. More than 99 percent of young green turtles born on beaches along the northern Great Barrier Reef are female, researchers report January 8 in Current Biology. If that imbalance in sex continues, the overall population could shrink.

Green sea turtle embryos develop as male or female depending on the temperature at which they incubate in sand. Scientists have known that warming ocean waters are skewing sea turtle populations toward having more females, but quantifying the imbalance has been hard.

Researchers analyzed hormone levels in turtles collected on the Great Barrier Reef (off the northeastern coast of Australia) to determine their sex, and then used genetic data to link individuals to the beaches where the animals originated. That two-pronged approach allowed the scientists to estimate the ratio of males to females born at different sites.

The sex ratio in the overall population is "nothing out of the ordinary," with roughly one juvenile male for every four juvenile females, says study coauthor Michael Jensen, a marine biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in La Jolla, Calif. But breaking the data down by the turtles' region of origin revealed worrisome results. In the cooler southern Great Barrier Reef, 67 percent of hatched juveniles were female. But more than 99 percent of young turtles hatched in sand soaked by warmer waters in the northern Great Barrier Reef were female - with one male for every 116 females. That imbalance has increased over time: 86 percent of the adults born in the area more than 20 years ago were female.

It's unclear what the long-term impact of such a strong skew will be, but it's probably not good news for the turtles. Sea turtle populations can get by with fewer males than females ( SN: 3/4/17, p. 16), but scientists aren't sure how many is too few. And while turtles can adapt their behavior, such as laying eggs in cooler places, the animals' instinct is to nest in the same spot they were born, which works against such a change.

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Warming ocean water is turning 99 percent of these sea turtles female

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Warming waters are turning some sea turtle populations female - to the extreme. More than 99 percent of young green turtles born on beaches along the northern Great Barrier Reef are female, researchers report January 8 in Current Biology. If that imbalance in sex continues, the overall population could shrink.

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A new study on Yellowstone's super volcano offers a simple explanation to its plume, a subducting tectonic plate which has been sinking for millions of years beneath North America. This plume has long been a subject of debate due to the fact that scientists cannot trace it to the core-mantle boundary. So, the scientists cannot seem to determine exactly how deep the plume extends into the Earth. Thus, the super volcano is maybe connected to the Earth's core. But, the recent discovery that the plate beneath the super volcano has been sinking does allow the scientists to consider that it is sinking and will continue to sink, increasing the heat in the plume. If the heat continues to build up, the super volcano has a larger and larger chance to erupt and change Yellowstone National Park as the world knows it. As for the history of the volcano, The last time it erupted was 640,00 years ago. The plate has moved northeastward from southwestern Idaho to its current location under the Yellowstone National Park. The shifting and eruptions that have happened there have caused a pattern of volcanic craters that very similarly resemble the hot spot of volcanic craters that created the Hawaiian island chain.

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The driving force behind Yellowstone's long and explosive volcanic history may not be as deep as once thought. A new study suggests that instead of a plume of hot mantle that extends down to Earth's core, the real culprit is a subducting tectonic plate that began sinking beneath North America hundreds of millions of years ago.

Computer simulations show that movement of broken-up remnants of the ancient Farallon Plate could be stirring the mantle in a way that fuels Yellowstone, researchers report December 18 in Nature Geoscience. "The fit is so good," says study coauthor Lijun Liu, a geodynamicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The giant supervolcano now beneath Yellowstone National Park, located mostly in Wyoming, has a 17-million-year history - much of it on the move. In that time, the locus of volcanism has moved northeastward from southwestern Idaho to its current location, where it most recently explosively erupted about 640,000 years ago. These shifting eruptions have created a track of volcanic craters resembling those created by the hot spot that formed the Hawaiian island chain. As a result, scientists have long suspected that a deep plume of magma originating from the core-mantle boundary, similar to the one that fuels Hawaii's volcanoes, is the source of Yellowstone's fury.

But the nature of the Yellowstone plume has been the subject of debate. "Usually with plumes, we can trace them to the core-mantle boundary," says Robert Porritt, a seismologist at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the new work. To "see" Earth's structure, seismologists use a technique called seismic tomography, which maps the interior using seismic waves generated by earthquakes. Particularly hot or liquid parts of the mantle slow some seismic waves known as shear waves. Tomographic images of mantle plumes such as the one beneath Hawaii show a low-velocity region that extends all the way down to the boundary between mantle and core, about 2,900 kilometers below Earth's surface. Such deep plumes are thought to be necessary to provide sufficient heat for the volcanism.

"But at Yellowstone, we don't have that large low-shear velocity thing at the core-mantle boundary," Porritt says. Current images suggest a region of low-velocity material extending at least 1,000 kilometers deep - but whether there is a deeper plume is uncertain.

And the region is tectonically complex. About 200 million years ago, a tectonic plate to the west, known as the Farallon Plate, began to slide eastward beneath the North American Plate. The current Juan de Fuca Plate off the Pacific Northwest coast, one of the last remnants of the Farallon Plate, continues to slide beneath the western United States. Some researchers have suggested that, instead of a deep mantle plume, the flexing and melting of the subducting Juan de Fuca Plate are responsible for Yellowstone's volcanism.
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Dragging down

Liu and his colleagues have yet another idea. In 2016, Liu published research suggesting that the sinking ancient Farallon slab was acting like a lid on a deep mantle plume, preventing the plume from rising to the surface ( SN Online: 2/3/16). "But we kept in mind that the problem was not solved," Liu says. "The heat source [for Yellowstone] was still missing."

The researchers created a sophisticated, supercomputer-driven series of simulations to try to find the best scenario that matches the three known knowns: the current tomographic images of the subsurface beneath the western United States; the volcanic history at Yellowstone as well as in the nearby Basin and Range regions; and the movements of the subducting slab since about 20 million years ago.

Yellowstone's volcanism is linked not just to the currently subducting young Juan de Fuca Plate, but also to the remnants of its older incarnation, the Farallon Plate, the simulations suggest. Those remnants have continued to slide deeper and now lie beneath the eastern United States. This downward dive dragged hot mantle eastward along with it. As the Juan de Fuca Plate began to break up beneath the western United States, the hot mantle rose through the cracks. Some of that hot mantle circulated back to the west across the top of the Juan de Fuca Plate, fueling volcanism in the Basin and Range region. And some of it flowed eastward, adding heat to Yellowstone's fire. The study doesn't rule out the presence of a deep magma plume, but it suggests that such a plume plays little role in Yellowstone's volcanism.

Porritt says he's intrigued by the idea that the sinking Farallon slab beneath the central and eastern United States could be driving mantle circulation on such a large scale. However, he says, he isn't convinced that the authors have truly solved the larger mystery of Yellowstone's volcanism - or that a yet-to-be-found deep plume still isn't playing a major role. "It's an interesting debate that's going to be raging, hopefully for decades."

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A sinking, melting ancient tectonic plate may fuel Yellowstone's supervolcano

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The driving force behind Yellowstone's long and explosive volcanic history may not be as deep as once thought. A new study suggests that instead of a plume of hot mantle that extends down to Earth's core, the real culprit is a subducting tectonic plate that began sinking beneath North America hundreds of millions of years ago.

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Miles of Ice Collapsing into the Sea (MP 2)

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Miles of Ice Collapsing into the Sea (MP 2)

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Whether or not Trump believes that climate change and global warming are real, events around the globe seem to be proving him wrong. New York Times reporters flew into the Arctic in order to find evidence of how ice was melting into the oceans at an exponential rate. Ice from ice shelves are melting in a downward motion, and into the sea, causing scientists to become scared the acceleration of this could cause an "unstoppable disintegration". In the worst case, the rapid melting of the ice shelf in Antarctica would cause the ocean to rise so far that civilizations along coasts would have to flee inland. While this may seem extremely unrealistic, maybe even too "Hollywood", the melting could cause many things to happen, especially at this rate. With all of this in mind, scientists are still frustrated with the information they lack, causing their projections for the future to be very shaky. They could be dead on, decades too fast, or decades too slow. What scientists do know is that the ice is melting at an alarming rate and the global community should care about finding out more information on how this will affect us both now and later.

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This is the last of three dispatches from a New York Times reporting trip to Antarctica.

From the air, the Ross Ice Shelf looks like a vast white plain extending to the horizon. The monochromatic landscape is relieved only occasionally by rocks poking through, or by deep crevasses in the ice itself.

Only at its edge does the ice shelf become something more dramatic: a spectacular sheer cliff rising 100 feet above the ocean and extending 900 feet below the surface. From that cliff edge, icebergs occasionally calve away, completing a thousand-year journey of the ice from land to sea.

Scientists are racing to understand what is happening to the Ross Ice Shelf - and the rest of Antarctica - as the planet warms around it. They are trying to map the thickness of the ice and the shape of the sea floor beneath it in an effort to gauge how vulnerable the shelf may be to collapse, and how soon that could happen.

Scientists are also trying to measure the role of human-caused climate change in weakening some parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and to fathom how damaging the seas around the continent might prove to be as they warm over time.

The answers carry profound implications for humanity. In the scientists' worst-case computer simulations, continued global warming will cause the Ross Ice Shelf to weaken and collapse starting as early as the middle of this century.

Right now, the shelf works like a giant bottle-stopper that slows down ice trying to flow from the land into the sea. If it collapses, the ice could flow into the ocean more rapidly, an effect that has already happened on a much smaller scale in other areas of Antarctica.

The most vulnerable parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet could raise the sea level by 10 to 15 feet, inundating many of the world's coastal cities, though most scientists think that would take well over a century, or perhaps longer. They are worried about a possible rise of as much as six feet by the end of this century.

Whether these alarming forecasts ultimately prove right depends in part on the shape of the sea floor beneath the ice shelf, and in particular on whether it has deep channels that can funnel warming ocean water under the ice shelf and attack the West Antarctic ice sheet from below. A different undersea topography - high ridges of rock, for example - may keep warmer water out, stabilizing the ice sheet, possibly for hundreds of years.

"We're hoping to figure out how warm water can get to the edge of the ice sheet," said Robin E. Bell, head of the Columbia University laboratory that sent a team to survey the Ross Ice Shelf late last year. "What are the sort of hidden roads it can go on?"

As they flew back and forth across the vast white landscape in December, the Columbia scientists used some of the world's most sophisticated geophysical instruments to see into and beneath the ice. As the hours-long flights wore on, the scientists took turns napping, knitting or eating cold pizza, but at all times, somebody kept close watch on the instruments.

Kirsty J. Tinto, the scientist leading the field team, loved watching as the measurements stripped away the illusion that the ice was just a flat, boring pancake.

"You take a slice through it and you can see a thousand years of history, a hundred million years of history," she said.

The Ross Ice Shelf appears stable now, so the Columbia project will function somewhat like a doctor's baseline X-ray - a starting point for comparison if the ice starts to deteriorate.

Satellite evidence suggests that this is already happening in other parts of West Antarctica, and many scientists believe that relatively warm ocean water is the culprit. "It's kind of a blowtorch on the underside of the ice shelf," said Robert A. Bindschadler, a retired NASA climate scientist.

But the story is not straightforward, and the warmer water attacking the ice has not been linked to global warming - at least not directly. The winds around the continent seem to be strengthening, stirring the ocean and bringing up a layer of warmer water that has most likely been there for centuries.

Are those stronger winds tied to human-caused global warming? Some scientists think so, but others say the case is unproven. "We're not sure because we don't have enough data, for long enough, to separate signal from noise," said Eric J. Steig, a scientist at the University of Washington who has studied temperature trends in Antarctica.

Though the role of global warming is unclear now, it is likely to be a factor in the relatively near future. Many experts think warmer air temperatures could start to weaken the ice of West Antarctica from above, even as warmer ocean water attacks it from below.

The warmer water seems to be doing the most damage to a series of glaciers that flow into a region of West Antarctica called the Amundsen Sea. Satellites have identified the most rapid loss of ice there, raising a critical question: Has an unstoppable collapse of the ice sheet already begun?

The Amundsen Sea region is one of the remotest parts of the continent, far from American and British research bases. Working together, the two countries are planning to devote tens of millions of dollars to getting better measurements there, having decided that it is imperative to begin answering questions about the region's potential collapse.

For instance, scientists need to know a lot more about the ground beneath the glaciers there. Is it slick mud that may allow the ice to flow much faster, or hard rock that may slow down the ice even in a warmer world?

"What we need to know is really the details of what is occurring where the ice, ocean and land all come together," said Ted A. Scambos, a University of Colorado scientist who is helping to plan the joint research effort.

Unraveling the answers, and gaining a better understanding of how Antarctica's ice has waxed and waned in the past, may offer a rough guide to the changes that human-caused global warming could wreak in the future.

Already, scientists know enough to be concerned. About 120,000 years ago, before the last ice age, the planet went through a natural warm period, with temperatures similar to those expected in coming decades.

The sea level was 20 to 30 feet higher than it is today, implying that the ice sheets in both Greenland and Antarctica must have partly disintegrated, a warning of what could occur in the relatively near future if the heating of the planet continues unchecked.

But some research suggests that a catastrophe might not yet be inevitable. In a study last year, Robert M. DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and David Pollard of Pennsylvania State University used their computer model to predict what would happen if emissions were reduced sharply over the next few decades, in line with international climate goals.

Under the most ambitious scenarios, they found a strong likelihood that Antarctica would remain fairly stable.

"There's still a chance that all hell will break loose," Dr. DeConto said. "But the model is suggesting there's a way to reduce the risk of a big sea-level rise from Antarctica."

In the immersive video below, we fly past a six-mile iceberg, a tiny fragment of the Ross Ice Shelf.

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This is the last of three dispatches from a New York Times reporting trip to Antarctica. From the air, the Ross Ice Shelf looks like a vast white plain extending to the horizon. The monochromatic landscape is relieved only occasionally by rocks poking through, or by deep crevasses in the ice itself.

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Ancient Dinosaur Shows World the Evolution of Birds (MP 2)

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Ancient Dinosaur Shows World the Evolution of Birds (MP 2)

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The Anchiornis was a bird-like species of dinosaur that had four wings and was roughly the size of a pigeon. In fact, the name even means "non-bird". Doesn't seem all that striking does it? The New York Times recently reported that scientists have in fact realized that the Anchiornis had feathers that changed the way they think about the flight of birds. With feathers that were small bushy plumes covering its back and neck, the Anchiornis did not have much use of them for flying. Unlike modern birds, this prehistoric bird had feathers that were not aerodynamic enough to allow for it to fly, but rather glide from tree to tree. The Anchiornis also did not have the reverse toe of modern birds, keeping them from having the ability to perch on trees. This discovery has allowed scientists to have more insight on how birds evolved from the dinosaurs, but has also made it a more complex path to how birds are they way they are today. It is only a stepping stone that shows the evolution birds have had throughout our history.

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US Life Expectancy Drops for the Second Year in a Row (MP 2)

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US Life Expectancy Drops for the Second Year in a Row (MP 2)

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The last time the there was back-to-back drops in the life expectancy was 50 years ago, and it just happened once again. The life expectancy rate in 2016 was 78.6, down 0.1 from 2015. Although, the life expectancy rates are different from men to women. Women's life expectancy rate is at 81.8 years of age and has continued along that track for the last two years. The leading cause of death in 2016 was heart disease, followed by cancer and surprisingly, unintentional injuries. These unintentional injuries range from drug overdoses to car crashes. It is stated that the overall drop in life expectancy is due to an "uptick in the age-adjusted death rates for unintentional injuries" such as Alzheimer's disease and suicide. But, with the technology and medical advancements we have today, there is not that much to worry about in the fact that the life expectancy rate has dropped once again.

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Life expectancy in the United States has decreased for the second year in a row, the first back-to-back drops in more than 50 years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

In 2016, life expectancy at birth was 78.6 years for the U.S. population as a whole. That's 0.1 year less than in 2015. For men, life expectancy decreased from 76.3 years in 2015 to 76.1 years in 2016, while in women it remained the same, at 81.1 years. The new data, from CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, are published online December 21.

Heart disease was the leading cause of death for 2016, followed by cancer, unintentional injuries such as drug overdoses and car crashes, chronic lower respiratory diseases including asthma, and stroke. Rounding out the top 10 causes of death were Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, kidney disease and suicide.

The overall drop in life expectancy is largely a result of an uptick in the age-adjusted death rates for unintentional injuries, Alzheimer's disease and suicide, the report's authors say.

Death rates by cause

Among the 10 leading causes of death, age-adjusted death rates went up for three causes and down for seven causes from 2015 to 2016.

Age-adjusted U.S. death rates for 10 leading causes of death, 2015 and 2016

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U.S. life expectancy drops for the second year in a row

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Life expectancy in the United States has decreased for the second year in a row, the first back-to-back drops in more than 50 years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. In 2016, life expectancy at birth was 78.6 years for the U.S. population as a whole.