Randy,

Makes you wonder if lubricating faults to trigger small quakes may 
actually be helping to keep those faults from building up enough 
strain energy for a bigger quake many years from now.  The energy in 
the quakes is definitely originating in the earth, not from the fluid 
pumping energy, which I calculate to be many orders of magnitude too small.

I wonder if that might become a method, some day far in the future, 
for attempting to avoid great quakes on the big faults, by preventing 
sections of them from becoming locked?  Most are probably too deep 
for wells, though.  Anyone who wanted to risk trying it would 
certainly need to have a really good understanding of what's going on 
down there, and I think I'd want to be far out of town if someone was 
going to try it.

I'd understood that there are sections of big faults that are somehow 
naturally lubricated which just creep slowly, though as a result they 
build up more stress to the adjoining locked fault sections.

Just a random thought.


Brett

At 09:02 AM 10/6/2012, you wrote:
>Just read my newspaper and found out there was a mag 3.3 near 
>Williston, ND.  The information states there are 10 past quakes 
>known in ND with 6 in the NW portion of the state and 2 of them 
>before the oil drilling began.  This quake was 7 miles from one of 
>390 disposal wells and this well was first injected in May of 2012.
>
>Randy
>


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