>like we've screwed ourselves with not just the air but the ground we stand on too

I'm reminded of something Margaret Atwood once said which boiled down to the fact that there is no starting civilization over, ever again, if we fall back into the Dark Ages. the metals for copper tools and iron-making are in forms that require a lot of technology to even re-smelt, and all the easily accessible mines that don't require heavy machinery and engineering are long mined out

we either get it right this time around or it's over for us

> Mining probably also plays a decent role.

In the Johannesburg area in South Africa, gold mining has produced up to half of all gold ever extracted in the world, with mines reaching depths of 4000m.

This has resulted in frequent seismic events, in the 2.0 to 3.0 range on the Richter scale, occurring on a daily or weekly basis, more occasionally reaching 5.0. This started around 1906 and still continues today. See:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S167477551...

I wonder if there's an argument to be made that these little earthquakes help release stored potential energy in the crust, preventing it from building into a more severe and dangerous event?

What kind of earthquakes in California ?

What's a little permanent undermining of unknown scope across wide swaths of developed area if it means a decade or two of profitability over the working life of the well? I mean have you even considered the shareholders interests?

As someone that has no stakes in the oil industry, I would describe fracking as deeply anti-social.

NK possessing nukes is the reason there hasn't been a war in the region for so long. Which gives a "good" model for Iran to follow. I'm not happy that NK has nukes, or that Iran is trying to get them, but you have to admit that while the US exists as it is, they are the only way for a nation to protect itself from constant wars and invasions. I would be willing to bet that Iran getting nukes would paradoxically make the Middle East much safer: the US and their allies would be forced to leave it alone, which in turn would shrink the anti-US sentiment in the long term, which would cut into the ranks of terrorist cells, etc.

NK nuclear testing has stopped them from being on the active ‘shit list’ like Iran for… decades? Or at least stopped them from being bombed.

I’m sure they’d disagree.

“Pro-social” is a strange way to describe something that’s actively contributing to the death of our civilization.

It's worse than people think. The fact that North Korea-traditionally nuttier than all the Middle Eastern governments combined-gets mean Hollywood movies made about them while Saddam, Gaddafi, and Assad got regime changed sent a certain kind of message, you know? Not to mention, the Iranians, Syrians, Pakistanis, et all could have never got off the ground without massive North Korean help.

I'm saying this as someone who is on the whole deeply cynical about Boomer pearl clutching when it comes to atomic proliferation.

Technically, Oklahoma is on the short list of locations that _have_ detonated a nuclear bomb on their enemies in wartime.

(Not to be contrarian, but I rather thought usa has recently and repeatedly threatened to bomb and nuke countries into stone age... And in fact went significant way through that effort over last few months, to the tune of some $40bil or so, for no clear, consistent, rational, elucidated reason whatsoever. And of course, rather famously, is the only country that actually deployed nuclear weapons against other people).

I don't necessarily disagree with your underlying point mind you, but USA isn't what it used to be internationally, if it ever truly was. "Oklahoma / USA are peaceful, predictable. rational political entities" is a rather laughable point to try to make today :-/

Isn't the US literally the only country to ever use a nuke against humans?

Not Oklahoma but Trump has made nuclear threats from Maryland this summer...

Oklahoma is part of US, and there were several threats! Just a few months ago against Iran!

Sure - but the content and intent of the article is clearly about understanding the geographic conditions that lead to sustained seismic activity, when that's not what our models currently predict.

And it's hardly like we're "super concerned about the tests because of the test itself" here... given we've triggered nearly 1000 underground nuclear blasts in the US alone, across several states (at least 6).

So... yeah - a relatively unstable state gaining nuclear capabilities sucks, but the interesting part of the discussion in the article is why we're seeing activity years after the testing.

Well oil is definitely the reason countries like Iraq or Venezuela have been held hostage by America.

Energy is logarithmic with magnitude, but if the underlying model is analogous to springs being loaded and suddenly released, that model is quadratic in energy with distance.

The article cites 1399 detectable follow-on earthquakes. If each of them represented a movement of earth an equal distance as compared to a single event, each of those movements would be 1/1399th in scale and therefore ~5x10^-7 in energy per event. (One two-millionth.)

I think that's clearly better.

So even if this does release pressure with no negative side effects anywhere it isn’t actually useful for preventing “the big one”.

There isA study about fire fighting. If you shit down every fire quickly then eventually you’ll have a major black swan. If you let fires burn a bit more then you’ll avoid black swan effect that burns down everything

I don’t think this is a good analogy.

I think this is analogus to lowering it bit by bit in small but manageable head bonks.

There're like 20 magnitude 4 earthquakes worldwide every day too. Even those are rarely noteworthy.

Huh. I never looked this stat up, but I assumed it was close to zero. The one time I had the house rattled in England with a 4.0 was a big surprise.

Typo: prescribed burns.

One of the most ridiculous pairs of approximate homophones in the English language.

Proscribed = forbidden. Prescribed = recommended/required.

>It gets into messy areas where it's hard to convince people that the damage was lesser than it otherwise would have been in the future.

Morbidly adjacent, the US is still getting dragged over the coals for using nukes on Japan rather than a ground invasion.

If they can’t build high speed rail along the corridor then surely they cannot geo engineer it either!

So possible in less regulated countries but not in the US. Here I think it would be far too much of a legal liability.

The soviets reportedly used nukes to cap uncontrolled leaking oil wells - https://www.npr.org/2010/06/04/127473704/stopping-a-spill-th...

Such ambition! Hey, there's a mountain in the way. Let's blow it up! The audacity to reshape the world in such a way that it suits ourselves has been lost. Why shouldn't we green the Sahara? Why can't we make a new continent?

More like a bond villain plot. Nefarious under the guise of altruism. And a volcano lair.

Not exactly a superhero movie, but The Core (2003) is kinda related