Michele Kearney's Environmental Blog: 5/6/12

5.0 Quake In Oklahoma Causes Fracking Fears | Culture of Life News

5.0 Quake In Oklahoma Causes Fracking Fears | Culture of Life News
This injection process could cause earthquakes but not the series of 4.0+ quakes we have been seeing lately. Are Fracking Wastewater Wells Causing Ohio's ...
emsnews.wordpress.com/.../5-0-quake-in-oklahoma-causes-fra...

Rosneft selects new partner to develop the Russian shelf

Moscow (Voice of Russia) May 11, 2012

Rosneft strikes Arctic deal with Statoil

Moscow (Voice of Russia) May 11, 2012

Russia's state oil champion Rosneft struck a $2.5 billion Arctic exploration deal Saturday with Norway's Statoil - its third global tie-up in a month and a sign of its growing global ambitions. The new deal was signed by the two companies' chief executives in the presence of Vladimir Putin and came only two days ahead of his swearing in to a third presidential term.

China's CNOOC starts deepwater drilling

Beijing (UPI) May 10, 2012

China National Offshore Oil Corp. has started China's first deep-sea drilling project in the South China Sea amid heightened territorial tensions over the disputed area. The $839.9 million CNOOC 981 - the country's first domestically manufactured deepwater drilling rig - drilled its first well Wednesday. The well, Liwan 6-1-1, is 199 miles southeast of the Hong Kong Special Adm

When Global Warming Hits Home (Literally)

by PeterLehner

In a recent PBS documentary, the mayor of Norfolk, Virginia, Paul Fraim, talks about how flooding has become a monthly occurrence in his town, and how global warming and sea level rise are as much a daily issue for him as education and fighting crime. In some parts of Norfolk, streets turn into rivers at high tide. Homes are flooded five out of six years. People lose their carpets, their appliances, their savings. And they can't afford to move elsewhere.

Push from Mississippi kept Deepwater Horizon oil slick off shore

Geoscientists offer an explanation for why the Deepwater Horizon oil spill didn't have the environmental impact that many had feared. Using publicly available datasets, their study reveals that the force of the Mississippi River emptying into the Gulf of Mexico created mounds of freshwater which pushed the oil slick off shore.

Greater insight into earthquake cycles

For those who study earthquakes, one major challenge has been trying to understand all the physics of a fault -- both during an earthquake and at times of "rest" -- in order to know more about how a particular region may behave in the future. Now, researchers have developed the first computer model of an earthquake-producing fault segment that reproduces the available observations of both the fault's seismic and aseismic behavior.

Water usage far exceed sustainability level in the desert southwest, US

The American West has a 'drinking problem'. On farms and in cities, we are guzzling water at an alarming rate. Scientists say that to live sustainably, we should use no more than 40 percent of the water from the Colorado River Basin. As it is now, we use 76 percent.