Fracking would pose no danger to water supplies, new research suggests

Hydraulic fracturing wellhead
[image credit: Joshua Doubek / Wikipedia]

It’s enough to make celebrity anti-fracking protesters choke on their cakes. — H/T Phys.org

Potential future fracking activity in the UK is unlikely to pose a pollution danger to overlying aquifers, new research from a leading academic suggests.

One of the primary concerns of those who oppose the development of shale gas by hydraulic fracturing is that creation of new fractures in the earth could cause fracking fluids to leak into, and contaminate, underground freshwater aquifers.

British shale oil may be ready to boom

Shale oil in south-east England [credit: BBC]

Surely even Britain can’t mess up an economic opportunity like this?
H/T GWPF

LONDON, April 18 (UPI) — The so-called Gatwick Gusher, a shale basin in the United Kingdom, could add as much as $74 billion to the nation’s economy, a study finds.

BBC promotes ‘Anthropocene’ hype: #38gate begins

The idea of lending the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) conjecture an air of scientific legitimacy by defining the period since the spread of agrarianism and industrialisation as a new geological age called the ‘Anthropocene’ has been bubbling along in the background for a number of years. In fact, it’s now got it’s own grand ‘working group’ consisting of the members listed below. This list was drawn to my attention by Matt McGrath of the BBC climate-propaganda unit, the de-facto promoter of the outfit.

I don’t know how many of these people are serious working geologists, but the names Naomi Oreskes and Andy Revkin jumped out at me, and put me in mind of that other list of 28 ‘world leading climate experts’ who the BBC used as an excuse to no-platform anyone critical of their alarmist climate-schtick back in 2005. A scandal that became known as 28gate, when the 28 ‘experts’ turned out to be activists from greenpeace, WWF, Stop Climate Chaos etc.

Earth’s pull is ‘massaging’ our moon

The Moon in front of Earth [credit: NASA]

Talkshop regular Ian Wilson features this story in his own latest blog post at Astro-Climate-Connection:

Many scientists deny that factors external to the Earth can have a significant impact upon the Earth’s climate yet there is considerable evidence that this indeed the case. Their instincts tell them that they must always look for internal factors, and internal factors alone, to explain the Earth’s climate systems. Most will admit that Moon might have some influence upon the Earth’s climate through the dissipation of its tidal forces in the Earth’s oceans but beyond that they have little time for thinking outside the box.

It is now emerging that those who reject the idea that factors external to the Earth can have a significant influence upon the Earth’s climate are increasingly at odds with the evidence.

Massive UK oil shale deposit can be extracted without ‘fracking’

UK shale oil – green for go? [image credit: glaconservatives]

The huge reserves at Horse Hill are in shale beds that are fractured naturally, as UPI.com reports.

At least 10 billion barrels of potential oil is thought to lie in the Horse Hill shale licence area in the south of the country, a British group said. U.K. Oil and Gas Ltd. said an independent assessment from oil services company Schlumberger found a mean 10.9 billion barrels of oil in place in a 55 square-mile area of the Horse Hill basin.

U.K. Oil and Gas Chairman Stephen Sanderson said the independent analysis predicts “significant” oil volumes and gives further support for development plans.

Uplifted island: the document of a complete seismic cycle

Sea lions get a lift in Chile
[credit: Daniel Melnick/I.B.Times]

The island Isla Santa María in the south of central Chile is the document of a complete seismic cycle, reports phys.org:

Charles Darwin and his captain Robert Fitzroy witnessed the great earthquake of 1835 in south central Chile. The “Beagle”-Captain’s precise measurements showed an uplift of the island Isla Santa María of 2 to 3 meters after the earthquake. What Darwin and Fitzroy couldn’t know was the fact that 175 years later nearly at the same position such a strong earthquake would recur.

Magnitude 4.3 Earthquake Rocks Kent: Woke Some People Up

Epicentre of the 4.3 quake was at 9.5km depth near Sandwich, Kent.

So we just had a 4.3 magnitude earthquake in Kent and my housemates slept through the entire thing -.- certainly woke me up! #earthquake

— Vikki Petts (@vikkipetts) May 22, 2015

BBC report

Earth’s core has a differentiated core

Photo by L. Brian Stauffer from press release

Earth’s surprise inside: Geologists unlock mysteries of the planet’s inner core
Thanks to a novel application of earthquake-reading technology, a research team at the University of Illinois and colleagues at Nanjing University in China have found that the Earth’s inner core has an inner core of its own, which has surprising properties that could reveal information about our planet.

http://news.illinois.edu/news/15/0209innercore_XiaodongSong.html

Extending a new Lunar thermal model, Part II: Modelling an airless Earth

This article is part II  of “A new Lunar thermal model based on Finite Element Analysis of regolith physical properties“,  written primarily by gallopingcamel (Peter Morcombe), edited and prepared for WordPress by Tim Channon.

Figure 1 (click full size)

Modeling the Moon

A few months ago an analysis of the Moon’s equatorial temperature was posted here using two different types of engineering software. Tim Channon used SPICE circuit analysis software originally developed at Berkeley while I used Quickfield, a finite element analysis program developed by Tor Cooperative, a Russian firm, marketed outside Russia by Tera Analysis. In addition, several detailed comments were received from “br” who used LTSPICE from Linear Technology Inc.

Two very different methods. The results were identical.

Both Quickfield (in Student edition) and LTSPICE are freely available for download for those interested in replication or for further investigation.

CCS: Where are the protests?

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)

“CCS is the only way we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions and keep fossil fuels (coal and gas) in the UK’s electricity supply mix” (DECC), and so say many other countries around the globe. Catch the CO2 and push it back underground. Just like waste water from fracking, but on an epic scale, so where are all the protests?

Luning presentation: geological view on solar dominance

Pierre L. Gosselin provides an English overview of a video presentation in German given by Dr. Sebastian Lüning, a geologist and co-author of the book “The Neglected Sun

This is a geological context that unfortunately is lost on many people like physicists who believe their formulae more than they believe the true facts.

Pierre mentions “All graphics cropped from Lüning’s presentation with permission.” so I won’t copy them here.

http://notrickszone.com/2014/06/29/german-geologist-ipcc-models-a-failure-have-no-chance-of-success-sees-possible-0-2c-of-cooling-by-2020

New isotope ratio evidence on Moon formation

Speculative result based on a new toy at University of Göttingen

How Did the Moon Really Form?

Dan is a deputy news editor for Science.
Email Daniel

By Daniel Clery Thursday, June 5, 2014 – 3:45pm

Planetary scientists have long believed that our moon formed following a collision between Earth and another planet, but studies of Earth and moon rocks suggest otherwise. A new analysis of the composition of moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts may help finally resolve the mystery.

Science magazine article

Shale gas or snail gas for the UK?

Shale gas geology

Dr Benny Peiser reports on the tortuous processes facing shale gas explorers in the UK.

‘In Texas, it takes seven days to get a permission for hydraulic fracturing of shale. In Britain, the wait has been going on for a whopping seven years’
http://www.thegwpf.org/benny-peiser-how-britain-is-wasting-its-real-shale-potential/

While we might not want a seven day approval period on a fairly crowded island, seven years seems a bit ludicrous.
No wonder some drilling firms have given up on the idea.

Government inertia may be rattled by the Ukraine crisis, as Dr Peiser suggests.
But will anything change apart from the rhetoric?

I name that asteroid ‘Mine’

Gold pan

It sounds like an April fool’s gag, but no:
‘Details have been emerging of the plan by billionaire entrepreneurs to mine asteroids for their resources.’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17827347

They claim:
“We’re in this for decades. But it’s not a charity. And we’ll make money from the beginning.”

B-b-but what about all that CO2 from rocket fuel burning?
Tut-tut😉

A new Lunar thermal model based on Finite Element Analysis of regolith physical properties

Article by Peter Morcombe (gallopingcamel) with some assistance from Tim Channon.

While investigating Nikolov & Zeller’s “Unified Theory of Climate” it seemed odd that professional scientists could not agree what the temperature of an airless Earth should be. Given that one needs to know this in order to compute the Greenhouse Effect (GHE), I tried to settle the question by analyzing the Diviner LRE data that accurately mapped the Moon’s surface temperature. This effort failed as my spreadsheet could not handle even the “Level 3” data. The Diviner team did much better and showed that the Moon’s average temperature is 197.3 Kelvin.

While the temperature of the Moon is now known with impressive precision, would an airless Earth have the same temperature or would the different rates of rotation have an effect?

Fossil fuels puzzle

Do all so-called fossil fuels originate from fossils or not?
It’s a puzzle, sometimes called the abiotic (non-biological) argument.

Dinosaur fossil
[image credit: wikipedia]

We know there’s methane elsewhere in the solar system:

‘The presence of methane on Saturn’s moon Titan and in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune is cited as evidence of the formation of hydrocarbons without biology, for example by Thomas Gold. (Terrestrial natural gas is composed primarily of methane). Some comets contain “massive amounts of an organic material almost identical to high grade oil shale (kerogen),” the equivalent of cubic kilometers of such mixed with other material; for instance, corresponding hydrocarbons were detected during a probe fly-by through the tail of Comet Halley in 1986.’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiotic_oil#Extraterrestrial_argument

Magnitude 5.1 quake sends shiver down Los Angeles spine

From Buzzfeed

LOS ANGELES — A shallow magnitude-5.1 earthquake struck the Los Angeles area Friday night, causing minor damage and injuries, scattered power outages, and gas leaks.

The earthquake occurred at 9:09 p.m. at a depth of 4.6 miles and was centered near Brea in Orange County — about 20 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. It was immediately followed by dozens of aftershocks, including a 3.4 and 3.6 magnitude.

No gas here, strange tale of the crater

I was unaware of this until today when someone pointed to a photograph in a newspaper.

Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derweze

Derwese, Turkmenistan

Remarkably Microsoft have a good shot Bing

500+ kg fragment of Chelyabinsk meteorite recovered from lake

MP4 video on site

Huge half-ton chunk of Russian meteorite lifted from lakebed

The meteorite if that is what it is, has broken into fragments.

Various news outlets have the story and pictures.

Michael Fallon: Southern NIMBY’s will have to accept fracking too.

From the London Evening Standard:

Energy Minister Michael Fallon: The South East must accept fracking
Joe Murphy, Political Editor

The South East must accept shale gas exploration for the sake of Britain’s economic future, Energy Minister Michael Fallon declared today.

He stepped after Surrey-based peer Lord Howell caused outrage by saying “desolate” areas of the North East should be targeted instead.

“It cannot be right to confine it to areas of the industrial North,” he told the Evening Standard.

“Shale exists under towns, villages and countryside. Shale gas is everywhere and could well be in quantity under attractive areas of the country as well as industrial areas.”

The Tory minister was cool about the remarks made by Lord Howell of Guildford, who is George Osborne’s father in law and a former Energy Secretary.

“He has apologised and it’s probably best left there,” he said. Lord Howell has been widely condemned by northern politicians and bishops for suggesting drilling should avoid the South.