Those official “contour lines” are lines of measured seismic effect. If a property lies completely outside then there has been no seismic activity. It is not an outrageous excuse to say cracked tiles in a bathroom were not caused by seismic activity, it is objective fact.
The author neglects to mention what the “natural rate” of earthquakes might be. The Dutch have been measuring seismic activity for more than 100 years. The Netherlands – before gas extraction – experienced a >4 event once every decade and >3 once every 2 years, concentrated in the north and south. An event of 3.6 in Huizinge all the way back in 2012 is pretty unremarkable.
And what of that “shallow depth” 3.6 event? Anything less than 4 very rarely causes damage and the Richter scale quoted is independent of depth – it is purely a measurement of surface movement so it is irrelevant how deep the quake was for quakes in the range 0-7. (For completeness, Richter is less good at recording large events, 3.6 is small.)
I’m sure the writer is simply reporting what she has heard, but is it too much to ask for some incredulity?
I think you mean credibility (believability) .
Credulity (gullibility) is what is exhibited in the article.
Important point you made about Richter and depth .
I presume you are a geologist specialising in earthquakes to make such bold assertions on the nature of earth quakes. If not then we cannot take your word for what you say on them and their effects on buildings etc.
The Richter Scale is quite accessible. You do not have to be a specialist to understand it.
The assertion that the earthquake was a 3.6 is in the article above, which describes as the worst ever experienced in the Groningen area.
The assertion that 3.6 is minor is in this Wiki article: 3.0-3.9 Minor. Often felt by people, but very rarely causes damage. Shaking of indoor objects can be noticeable
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale#Richter_magnitudes
The modern “Richter’ scale is not a measure of surface waves but energy released at the source of slippage. Hence depth is critical to the amount of damage done as damage falls off with the square of distance from the slippage. (One one is 10 times the distance of the size of the slippage zone.).So you might want to consider your “incredulity”.
I’m not sure you demonstrate much, or any, practical knowledge.
Your first paragraph is completely incorrect. The fact is that contours are a guide. The ground is not a homogeneous lump and energy will follow a path of least resistance so it is well known that tremors can extend in irregular patterns- and I have direct experience of this. For a design guide the contour would be a statistical outer bound, but I don’t think that would apply here.
Your second paragraph makes no sense – random statistics rarely do without the full context.
The Richter scale is an unreliable guide as you have noted, however your third paragraph is also completely wrong. It is known that “shallow” energy release causes substantially more structural damage due to horizontal motion. Deeper events cause vertical movement but less structural damage. It is also very dependent on the local geology. Geologically these events are very shallow.
I don’t profess by any means to be an expert but spent 5 years of my life living in an earthquake zone learning under the leading authority on structural design at the time.
We have a saying here in the Netherlands. I believe in English it is: “By now, many of them have heard the clock ticking, but are not sure when midnight will strike”. The situation of the induced earthquakes in Groningen is different from normal natural quakes. In fact they are shallow (3 km). Some quakes even were triggered above the salt layer (1 km). Richter only provides the ammount of energy released. Induced quakes cannot be compared to Tectonic quakes based on Richter. Especially in Groningen were the soil is mostly clay and peat with some sandfilled old streams in between. In the seismic field we use Mercalli scale for real damage of a quake at the surface. It is mostly based on people filling in forms. The government in the Netherlands was reluctant to use Mercalli. Now we have PGA as the main factor for paying damages. The government made a model based on PGA but that model does not take into account the differences on a small scale of the geological situation in a site. We are still struggling at court to get our damages paid so it is clear that Groningen does not want more quakes due to more extraction of gas. Groningen is a slow motion disaster and everyone saying it is not does not now the real situation. I lived here all my life and hope to live here safe and happily the coming decades.
Matt M
1 year ago
In Britain we have 3.6 earthquakes every few years. The effect is said to be like a heavy lorry driving past the road outside your house.
If it is that or £5k a year on fuel bills, I suspect people will take the occasional tremor.
We haven’t had a decent earthquake since 1884. That one measured 4.6 on the Richter scale, possibly killed one child and caused the collapse of a couple of church towers. Hardly San Francisco then.
We had one in Shropshire sometime in the eighties. I was sitting in my car in the carpark waiting for the office to open. It felt like someone had pushed down hard on the boot and the car bounced around on the suspension for a few seconds.
Hardly “earthquakes”! A few cracked buildings is a price worth paying for energy security. Better that than old people freezing to death in the winter.
Ian Stewart
1 year ago
13,000 houses, average cost of underpinning for earthquake protection say £30k maximum = about £400 million.
Are the Dutch stupid? Closing a field that generates hundreds of billions in revenue for these cheap remedial measures? Oh and new housing should be designed to be earthquake proof – that adds a small new build cost.
Actually the Dutch Government is stupid, along with most governments. It is almost insane to refuse to fund compensation when critical policies are at stake – not just gas extraction but other kinds of land development or even vaccination. The problem is that most government are petrified about establishing the principle that losers must be compensated and even when they accept it they are foolishly parsimonious. In the short run they save money, but the long run damage is enormous due to resistance to all kinds of development or potentially good changes in policy. One symptom of this is a bureaucratic mentality that the state (or its organs) can do what it likes if this is justified in some way as being for the greater good. Consider the whole fuss in the Netherlands about restrictions on nitrogen use by farmers.
The other problem apparent in this case is making any compensation subject to rigid bureaucratic rules such as seismicity contours. Veering on the side of generosity is sensible in the longer term. But, even more, it is critical to have an appeals mechanism at low cost to appellants but giving them a chance to submit evidence. This is what I mean by foolish parsimony as illustrated by the classic dictum “don’t spoil the ship for a ha’p’th of tar”. Of course there will be fraudulent or mistaken claims but it is not possible to found serious political resistance on such cases alone.
Every new industry that has environmental impacts will create winners and losers. Serious moral and eventually legal problems will arise unless the losers are promptly and fairly compensated. If the industry can’t or won’t provide the compensation the responsibility falls on government.
Gas in Frisia is not a new industry and plenty money and compensation has been handed out. The article is using disputes about some of the compensation arrangements as a platform for wider allegations about the industry in general.
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago
Last I heard , for all drilling and mining in Groningen and Frisia, activities must stop if subsidence reaches 6cm.
You can see the markers on many houses that have cracked brickwork going back years. It is a known environmental factor and is subject to constant management. I have no doubt that gas extraction (and salt and magnesium mining that is also carried out in this area) contributes but it is subject to strict controls, contrary to the implications in this article.
This has been the case for many years as the ground there is notoriously spongy and porous and also has natural gas seeps.
People still build there and move there because it’s economically successful and contributes much ti Netherlands economy and life.
Geologically speaking, the entire country of The Netherlands is one great big mudflat. It is to be expected that some ground subsidence will occur, and brick walls are ubiquitous, heavy, and easily damaged as a result. I see cracked masonry in the minority of houses built of brick instead of wood here, in the western valley of Oregon. Wood-frame houses make up the majority, and they are a lot more resilient. The same thing has been observed in earthquake-prone Japan. And have you noticed that earthquakes in countries that have only stone buildings are always catastrophic?
Last edited 1 year ago by Wim de Vriend
Patrick Heren
1 year ago
What this article doesn’t say – perhaps the author doesn’t know, or simply doesn’t care – is that the real value of the Groningen field has always been its enormous flexibility. It provided the Netherlands, Belgium, western Germany and northern France with what the industry calls “swing” gas, supplies that ramped up in response to cold weather demand. For 5 decades it was the very basis of the NW European gas industry. Where long distance suppliers like Norway and Russia could only deliver gas at a fairly steady rate all year round, Groningen produced and supplied in response to short term demand, dictated largely by winter temperatures. In some years it produced 40 billion cu me, in others as much as 80. The alternative to swing gas is storage – lots of it. As we in the UK – historically the now largely defunct southern North Sea was Europe’s other big swing supplier – now realise, we don’t have enough of it. There is more storage on the continent, but not enough Russian gas to fill it ahead of winter, which we must all pray turns out to be a mild one.
Groningen still has the capacity to act as a strategic swing field, if the Dutch government would allow it to be. This is not to minimise the subsidence problems caused by extraction over the years. But we should all understand the other side of the coin – and the cost of shutting in such an enormous gas resource.
Last edited 1 year ago by Patrick Heren
Malcolm Webb
1 year ago
The bias in this article is clear from the early reference to “slippery oil firms” closely followed by the allegation that Liz Truss has lifted a ban on “ unconventional” fracking – whatever that is!
Sadly we repeatedly hear the case for the prosecution of the oil and gas industry and, only very rarely, that of the defence. This is just another example of that phenomenon . As such it must be treated with great reserve, if not discounted entirely.
There is always corruption when there is a big compensation pot to distribute. Not only on the industry’s side. Unless you’re talking about the lawyers’ industry.
Martin Brumby
1 year ago
One might ponder an adaptation of a current common question: –
Does this article tell the truth? Or did she see it all on RT?
Others have pointed out that Richter 3.6 is a trivial tremor. Not something that any sensible geologist would describe as an “earthquake”.
At Richter 4.0, the normal level where quarrying, blasting, pile driving, proximity to heavy transport (a high speed train, perhaps) cause seismicity that most people will experience if awake, regulatory authorities usually start taking an interest.
A 4.0 tremor occurs quite often in the UK and regularly in the past when deep mining for coal. Subsidence levels in the Selby coalfield were restricted to 990mm. Not 6mm. This took careful planning and monitoring but when the mining was prematurely ended, any honest person would admit that the surface drainage over the whole area had benefitted by new carefully designed and constructed drainage and pumping systems paid for by coal. Buildings affected by subsidense (mainly in the tension zones at the edges of the long wall panels) were correctly repaired, almost always at the occupants’ entire satisfaction.
Most people thought it a reasonable trade for affordable and reliable energy.
But I must again point out that Richter is a logarithmic scale. Ed Davey’s 0.5 Richter seismic limit for fracking is 3,162 times WEAKER than Richter 4.0. So his frequent boast that he had stopped fracking (whilst trousering £18,000 a year from a Solar “Energy” company) was factual. For which he already deserves severe punishment.
Steve Elliott
1 year ago
Isn’t there a difference between older types of gas extraction which has been going on a very long time in places like the north sea and fracking? I have read that fracking is normally carried out at much lower depths than normal gas extraction and to carry low risk due to earthquakes.
Not that big a difference – fracking tight shale to extract gas and oil is at whatever reachable depth the tight shales are. Cuadrilla’s target shale in Lancashire is around 2700m deep.
The gas formations in Frisia are somewhat shallower and are not tight shale as far as I know. This student paper gives an idea of the geological and technical situation: https://www.1stsom.com/post/subsidence-groningen-and-the-future-for-gas-production-in-the-netherlands
That is true. The geologists’ explanation I have seen says that the Netherlands and Scandinavia are on the same tectonic plate; its northern part including Norway and Sweden has been rising (or rebounding) due to the melting of the Ice Age glaciers on those mountains, so the Dutch at the other end are sinking as part of a teeter-totter mechanism.
Those official “contour lines” are lines of measured seismic effect. If a property lies completely outside then there has been no seismic activity. It is not an outrageous excuse to say cracked tiles in a bathroom were not caused by seismic activity, it is objective fact.
The author neglects to mention what the “natural rate” of earthquakes might be. The Dutch have been measuring seismic activity for more than 100 years. The Netherlands – before gas extraction – experienced a >4 event once every decade and >3 once every 2 years, concentrated in the north and south. An event of 3.6 in Huizinge all the way back in 2012 is pretty unremarkable.
And what of that “shallow depth” 3.6 event? Anything less than 4 very rarely causes damage and the Richter scale quoted is independent of depth – it is purely a measurement of surface movement so it is irrelevant how deep the quake was for quakes in the range 0-7. (For completeness, Richter is less good at recording large events, 3.6 is small.)
I’m sure the writer is simply reporting what she has heard, but is it too much to ask for some incredulity?
I think you mean credibility (believability) .
Credulity (gullibility) is what is exhibited in the article.
Important point you made about Richter and depth .
Haha, yes. I was aiming for incredulity, not believing everything you are told. Properly edited thanks to you.
Skepticism might have been a better choice.
I presume you are a geologist specialising in earthquakes to make such bold assertions on the nature of earth quakes. If not then we cannot take your word for what you say on them and their effects on buildings etc.
The Richter Scale is quite accessible. You do not have to be a specialist to understand it.
The assertion that the earthquake was a 3.6 is in the article above, which describes as the worst ever experienced in the Groningen area.
The assertion that 3.6 is minor is in this Wiki article: 3.0-3.9 Minor. Often felt by people, but very rarely causes damage. Shaking of indoor objects can be noticeable
Link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale#Richter_magnitudes
Wiki isn’t really a go to for detailed science.
The modern “Richter’ scale is not a measure of surface waves but energy released at the source of slippage. Hence depth is critical to the amount of damage done as damage falls off with the square of distance from the slippage. (One one is 10 times the distance of the size of the slippage zone.).So you might want to consider your “incredulity”.
I’m not sure you demonstrate much, or any, practical knowledge.
Your first paragraph is completely incorrect. The fact is that contours are a guide. The ground is not a homogeneous lump and energy will follow a path of least resistance so it is well known that tremors can extend in irregular patterns- and I have direct experience of this. For a design guide the contour would be a statistical outer bound, but I don’t think that would apply here.
Your second paragraph makes no sense – random statistics rarely do without the full context.
The Richter scale is an unreliable guide as you have noted, however your third paragraph is also completely wrong. It is known that “shallow” energy release causes substantially more structural damage due to horizontal motion. Deeper events cause vertical movement but less structural damage. It is also very dependent on the local geology. Geologically these events are very shallow.
I don’t profess by any means to be an expert but spent 5 years of my life living in an earthquake zone learning under the leading authority on structural design at the time.
We have a saying here in the Netherlands. I believe in English it is: “By now, many of them have heard the clock ticking, but are not sure when midnight will strike”. The situation of the induced earthquakes in Groningen is different from normal natural quakes. In fact they are shallow (3 km). Some quakes even were triggered above the salt layer (1 km). Richter only provides the ammount of energy released. Induced quakes cannot be compared to Tectonic quakes based on Richter. Especially in Groningen were the soil is mostly clay and peat with some sandfilled old streams in between. In the seismic field we use Mercalli scale for real damage of a quake at the surface. It is mostly based on people filling in forms. The government in the Netherlands was reluctant to use Mercalli. Now we have PGA as the main factor for paying damages. The government made a model based on PGA but that model does not take into account the differences on a small scale of the geological situation in a site. We are still struggling at court to get our damages paid so it is clear that Groningen does not want more quakes due to more extraction of gas. Groningen is a slow motion disaster and everyone saying it is not does not now the real situation. I lived here all my life and hope to live here safe and happily the coming decades.
In Britain we have 3.6 earthquakes every few years. The effect is said to be like a heavy lorry driving past the road outside your house.
If it is that or £5k a year on fuel bills, I suspect people will take the occasional tremor.
We haven’t had a decent earthquake since 1884. That one measured 4.6 on the Richter scale, possibly killed one child and caused the collapse of a couple of church towers. Hardly San Francisco then.
Quite a few regularly in the Midlands – including a 4.8 only 14 years ago – and another 4.8 20 years ago:
https://earthquaketrack.com/gb-eng-dudley/biggest
We had one in Shropshire sometime in the eighties. I was sitting in my car in the carpark waiting for the office to open. It felt like someone had pushed down hard on the boot and the car bounced around on the suspension for a few seconds.
Thank you, any substantial damage?
I found this
https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/nostalgia/2022/03/28/flashback-to-1990-when-the-earth-shook-and-a-town-trembled/
The one I remembered was 1984 but according to the news item there was another one in 1990 which I don’t remember. I remember there was a lot of excitement in the newspapers and radio. Also lots of lame jokes along the lines of “Did the earth move for you?”
Many thanks!
Hardly “earthquakes”! A few cracked buildings is a price worth paying for energy security. Better that than old people freezing to death in the winter.
13,000 houses, average cost of underpinning for earthquake protection say £30k maximum = about £400 million.
Are the Dutch stupid? Closing a field that generates hundreds of billions in revenue for these cheap remedial measures? Oh and new housing should be designed to be earthquake proof – that adds a small new build cost.
Actually the Dutch Government is stupid, along with most governments. It is almost insane to refuse to fund compensation when critical policies are at stake – not just gas extraction but other kinds of land development or even vaccination. The problem is that most government are petrified about establishing the principle that losers must be compensated and even when they accept it they are foolishly parsimonious. In the short run they save money, but the long run damage is enormous due to resistance to all kinds of development or potentially good changes in policy. One symptom of this is a bureaucratic mentality that the state (or its organs) can do what it likes if this is justified in some way as being for the greater good. Consider the whole fuss in the Netherlands about restrictions on nitrogen use by farmers.
The other problem apparent in this case is making any compensation subject to rigid bureaucratic rules such as seismicity contours. Veering on the side of generosity is sensible in the longer term. But, even more, it is critical to have an appeals mechanism at low cost to appellants but giving them a chance to submit evidence. This is what I mean by foolish parsimony as illustrated by the classic dictum “don’t spoil the ship for a ha’p’th of tar”. Of course there will be fraudulent or mistaken claims but it is not possible to found serious political resistance on such cases alone.
That’s what I meant to say!
Penny-wise and pound-foolish, yes?
This was my thought.
Every new industry that has environmental impacts will create winners and losers. Serious moral and eventually legal problems will arise unless the losers are promptly and fairly compensated. If the industry can’t or won’t provide the compensation the responsibility falls on government.
Gas in Frisia is not a new industry and plenty money and compensation has been handed out. The article is using disputes about some of the compensation arrangements as a platform for wider allegations about the industry in general.
Last I heard , for all drilling and mining in Groningen and Frisia, activities must stop if subsidence reaches 6cm.
You can see the markers on many houses that have cracked brickwork going back years. It is a known environmental factor and is subject to constant management. I have no doubt that gas extraction (and salt and magnesium mining that is also carried out in this area) contributes but it is subject to strict controls, contrary to the implications in this article.
This has been the case for many years as the ground there is notoriously spongy and porous and also has natural gas seeps.
People still build there and move there because it’s economically successful and contributes much ti Netherlands economy and life.
Geologically speaking, the entire country of The Netherlands is one great big mudflat. It is to be expected that some ground subsidence will occur, and brick walls are ubiquitous, heavy, and easily damaged as a result. I see cracked masonry in the minority of houses built of brick instead of wood here, in the western valley of Oregon. Wood-frame houses make up the majority, and they are a lot more resilient. The same thing has been observed in earthquake-prone Japan. And have you noticed that earthquakes in countries that have only stone buildings are always catastrophic?
What this article doesn’t say – perhaps the author doesn’t know, or simply doesn’t care – is that the real value of the Groningen field has always been its enormous flexibility. It provided the Netherlands, Belgium, western Germany and northern France with what the industry calls “swing” gas, supplies that ramped up in response to cold weather demand. For 5 decades it was the very basis of the NW European gas industry. Where long distance suppliers like Norway and Russia could only deliver gas at a fairly steady rate all year round, Groningen produced and supplied in response to short term demand, dictated largely by winter temperatures. In some years it produced 40 billion cu me, in others as much as 80. The alternative to swing gas is storage – lots of it. As we in the UK – historically the now largely defunct southern North Sea was Europe’s other big swing supplier – now realise, we don’t have enough of it. There is more storage on the continent, but not enough Russian gas to fill it ahead of winter, which we must all pray turns out to be a mild one.
Groningen still has the capacity to act as a strategic swing field, if the Dutch government would allow it to be. This is not to minimise the subsidence problems caused by extraction over the years. But we should all understand the other side of the coin – and the cost of shutting in such an enormous gas resource.
The bias in this article is clear from the early reference to “slippery oil firms” closely followed by the allegation that Liz Truss has lifted a ban on “ unconventional” fracking – whatever that is!
Sadly we repeatedly hear the case for the prosecution of the oil and gas industry and, only very rarely, that of the defence. This is just another example of that phenomenon . As such it must be treated with great reserve, if not discounted entirely.
There is always corruption when there is a big compensation pot to distribute. Not only on the industry’s side. Unless you’re talking about the lawyers’ industry.
One might ponder an adaptation of a current common question: –
Does this article tell the truth? Or did she see it all on RT?
Others have pointed out that Richter 3.6 is a trivial tremor. Not something that any sensible geologist would describe as an “earthquake”.
At Richter 4.0, the normal level where quarrying, blasting, pile driving, proximity to heavy transport (a high speed train, perhaps) cause seismicity that most people will experience if awake, regulatory authorities usually start taking an interest.
A 4.0 tremor occurs quite often in the UK and regularly in the past when deep mining for coal. Subsidence levels in the Selby coalfield were restricted to 990mm. Not 6mm. This took careful planning and monitoring but when the mining was prematurely ended, any honest person would admit that the surface drainage over the whole area had benefitted by new carefully designed and constructed drainage and pumping systems paid for by coal. Buildings affected by subsidense (mainly in the tension zones at the edges of the long wall panels) were correctly repaired, almost always at the occupants’ entire satisfaction.
Most people thought it a reasonable trade for affordable and reliable energy.
But I must again point out that Richter is a logarithmic scale. Ed Davey’s 0.5 Richter seismic limit for fracking is 3,162 times WEAKER than Richter 4.0. So his frequent boast that he had stopped fracking (whilst trousering £18,000 a year from a Solar “Energy” company) was factual. For which he already deserves severe punishment.
Isn’t there a difference between older types of gas extraction which has been going on a very long time in places like the north sea and fracking? I have read that fracking is normally carried out at much lower depths than normal gas extraction and to carry low risk due to earthquakes.
Not that big a difference – fracking tight shale to extract gas and oil is at whatever reachable depth the tight shales are. Cuadrilla’s target shale in Lancashire is around 2700m deep.
The gas formations in Frisia are somewhat shallower and are not tight shale as far as I know. This student paper gives an idea of the geological and technical situation: https://www.1stsom.com/post/subsidence-groningen-and-the-future-for-gas-production-in-the-netherlands
Thanks for the link. Interesting to note that the paper describes the Netherlands as a naturally subsiding country.
That is true. The geologists’ explanation I have seen says that the Netherlands and Scandinavia are on the same tectonic plate; its northern part including Norway and Sweden has been rising (or rebounding) due to the melting of the Ice Age glaciers on those mountains, so the Dutch at the other end are sinking as part of a teeter-totter mechanism.
The author doesn’t say how big the cracks are, how many there are and their nature, A house of that age you’d expect new cracks regularly as they move continuously. This is a useful guide – up to 5mm are regarded as ‘aesthetic issues’ only:
https://bregroup.com/insights/assessing-cracks-in-houses/?fbclid=IwAR2g_Li6C4bMdLJ3ar8xQlQ0Dwny8YUkYmMhSSVMTkNszX5wEJdPGtFbqyA
Funny how their own Royal Family is Neck Deep in Shell Oil. And when Willem Alexander was prince, he said he was going to be the “prince of water.”