long-term effects?
Dec. 14th, 2002 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eHmmm... was just thinking about what "we" are doing when extracting oil from the ground. 76 million barrels of it per day -- so much that burning it has begun to interfere with the balance of gasses that determine the climate.
The first weird thing is that nobody really knows where all this oil comes from. In school they will tell you that it comes from ancient vegetation buried millions of years ago and "cooked", but I have heard more recently of work showing that the amount of life in the ground far exceeds the amount on the surface; that the rocks and fissures deep beneath our feet teem with microbes. (I am not just talking about topsoil -- I mean strata to depths of kilometers.) It may well be that these micro-organisms are the creators of all that oil and gas. When we pump such vast amounts out what effects are we having? Can it possibly have future repercussions that affect us here on the surface? We had better be pretty damn sure.
The second thing is that from what I understand we pump water down there to replace all this oil -- 76 million barrels of it every day. What effect might this have? Does anybody know? Have you heard of Krakatoa? That Indonesian island exploded when water leaked in to the hot rocks of the volcano and turned to steam. The boom was heard by people in China and the vast dust cloud affected weather patterns around the world, bringing famines in Europe and elsewhere.
Sure, almost all of these oil sites might be perfectly safe to pump large quantities of water into... but we only need one site to fail catastrophically...
Tell me that somebody has considered this and that there is absolutely zero chance of big bad.
The first weird thing is that nobody really knows where all this oil comes from. In school they will tell you that it comes from ancient vegetation buried millions of years ago and "cooked", but I have heard more recently of work showing that the amount of life in the ground far exceeds the amount on the surface; that the rocks and fissures deep beneath our feet teem with microbes. (I am not just talking about topsoil -- I mean strata to depths of kilometers.) It may well be that these micro-organisms are the creators of all that oil and gas. When we pump such vast amounts out what effects are we having? Can it possibly have future repercussions that affect us here on the surface? We had better be pretty damn sure.
The second thing is that from what I understand we pump water down there to replace all this oil -- 76 million barrels of it every day. What effect might this have? Does anybody know? Have you heard of Krakatoa? That Indonesian island exploded when water leaked in to the hot rocks of the volcano and turned to steam. The boom was heard by people in China and the vast dust cloud affected weather patterns around the world, bringing famines in Europe and elsewhere.
Sure, almost all of these oil sites might be perfectly safe to pump large quantities of water into... but we only need one site to fail catastrophically...
Tell me that somebody has considered this and that there is absolutely zero chance of big bad.