I guess I wasn't the only one who studied our local geologic strata and concluded there might be some extended cracks between layers. For me, that was mostly what I got from reading the patron geologist of the Marcellus Shale,...
The fracking and earthquakes conversation has a lot of dimensions. I had a lot of questions about the DSGEIS fumbling the information on faults that was available. I was less concerned, though, with fracking causing earthquakes that with the other...
Now I'm starting to wonder if anything at all in the Geology chapter (4.2MB PDF) of the Revised Draft SGEIS on the Oil, Gas and Solution Mining Regulatory Program can be trusted. I posted a while ago about the 'fairway'...
Back in October, I had some questions about the DEC's take on Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials. Today, reading the Environmental Protection Agency's comments on the dSGEIS, I got a bit of a jolt. I'd wondered: Section 5.2.4.2 reports on tests...
It took a month, but I've finally finished my comments on the Revised Draft SGEIS on the Oil, Gas and Solution Mining Regulatory Program (September 2011) - Well Permit Issuance for Horizontal Drilling and High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing in the Marcellus...
Unlike other more plausible sections of the geology chapter of the draft SGEIS on shale gas drilling (4.2MB PDF), I knew that the last section - 4.7, Naturally-Occurring Methane in NYS - was broken from the first time I read...
I'm not especially impressed with the Marcellus Shale SGEIS, but the DEC seems to go out of its way to fuel my suspicions that the document is pretty much a sham: That passage [of the SGEIS] cites as a reference...
Geology of New York: A Simplified Account startled me with mention that there was kimberlite in the Ithaca area. Kimberlite? In Ithaca? The stuff named after Kimberley, South Africa, and its 1870s diamond rush? An igneous rock coming through our...
I thought about calling this piece "Impacts of the Alleghanian Orogeny", but that just sounded too strange, even for an article based on writings of the patron geologist of the Marcellus Shale pointing out structures that help make drilling here...
I wrote about faults the other day, and it already looks like I may have underestimated their impact in an age where we like to inject things deep underground. There's also a piece on potential legal earthquakes from all of...
The last time I wrote about, this, I was pointing to what looked like a single small faulted area in Dryden along the Caroline town line. Faults in Tompkins County. That came from Figure 4.13 in the Geology section of...
I mostly enjoyed the first 35 pages of the hydrofracking SGEIS chapter on geology. Then I hit page 4-35. It rapidly became clear that while there's some information where the oil and gas companies' approach - and apparently that of...
Update: I'm now pretty sure there's more than the DEC reports to this story. Okay, okay, it's hard to imagine that Dryden has faults. However, the Geology section of the hydrofracking SGEIS (4.2 MB PDF) includes Figure 4.13, a map...
I mentioned earlier that Dryden is at "an interesting geological location", but hadn't gone into much depth about why. The first half of the geological section of the New York State draft SGEIS (4.2MB PDF) explores the question of where...