Here is a story that, so far as The Tracker can tell, appears only on National Geographics’s online news service. That is curious. A well-attended press conference at last month’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco included mention from a Columbia-U, Lamont Doherty researcher that the most destructive earthquake in the known history of Australia resulted from a tectonic reaction to extensive coal mining. That’s apparently not been reported before. It looks like news from this corner.

Freelancer Richard A. Lovett heard it, wrote it, and is also surprised nobody else ran with it right away. It is a well-rounded piece about the scientist and his long study of anthropogenic quakes around the world, about this particular quake, and about the researcher’s discovery that the temblor’s $3.5 billion damage is more than the local coal fields ever produced. The event, in 1989, was only magnitude 5.6, but Australia ordinarily has only pipsqueak quakes. Thirteen people died as several buildings in New South Wales went down. They are Australia’s only known earthquake fatalities, ever.

Read it;

Grist for the Mill: AGU program abstract with interesting suggestion that the old mines are candidates for CO2 sequestration — and that might bring more tectonic tantrums.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.