speaking about eartquakes... I think I mentioned we got those here because of gasdrilling?
one of our northern provinces(groningen) has the biggest gasbell of the country. they always said it wouldn't cause earthquakes, and there's a history of denying ground-descent also(while it's klogical that if you take something out of the ground, the toplevel will descend)(the ground descent discussuion is more about saltextraction than gas though, in the case of this gasbell they did predict some ground-descent, but minor, less than what actually happened, and they said this minor grounddescent wouldn't lead to any problems like earthquakes, and it took multiple eartquakes to make them stop denying it, the 'they' here is the NAM, wich is owned by shell and exxonmobile)
well, about last year they couldn't deny it anymore, there was an earthquake of 3,6 richter. and that's without any faultlines, it's the descending soil(btw, this is a convential gasdrillingoperation, no fracking). and the funny thing is, it turns out the earthquakes usually happen a set amount of time after the peak extraction of gas(the time of year when most gas is extracted). so by now it's pretty clear that if we continue extracting gas at the same pace, the eartquakes will get worse. while we used to never have eartquakes in this country(well, ok, very rare and weak eartquakes, but not anything serious, we don't have faultlines). and what's the political discussion about? who is to blame, and most importantly, who has to pay the damages to houses in that area. meanwhile, the drilling continues, a few have suggested to slow down extraction, but it seems very unlikely they will slow down the gasextraction.
and they also want to dril in the waddensea(or maybe they are already doing it on a small scale), a shallow sea above the provinces groningen en friesland, divided from the northsea by a row of islands. this is a unique and protected invironment, the defining characteristic is that large parts of this sea fall dry with ebb. so the only think keeping it existent is the present groundlevel and sealevel, a rising sealevel will eventually destroy it, but combined with a descending groundlevel it would be gone much quicker.
