FYI: Can Humans Trigger Earthquakes?
Yes. We drill into the earth to mine for gas, oil and minerals and construct massive dams and, as a result, have caused at least 200 quakes of more than 4.5 magnitude in the past 160 years, says Christian Klose, a researcher at Columbia University who studies man-made quakes. The best-known case is the earthquake caused by the Zipingpu Dam, in China's Sichuan province, in 2008. Zipingpu held 42.3 billion cubic feet of water, the weight of which precipitated what Klose says is the largest human-triggered earthquake to date: a 7.9-magnitude quake that killed nearly 80,000 people. Klose estimates that Zipingpu, with nearly 320 million tons of water pressing down on a fault line, contributed enough stress to trigger the quake through a process called impoundment. "If you push your finger on top of a paper plate, the plate will bend," he says. "That same effect works on all the tectonic...