Pakistan Quake Sets Off Massive Offshore Gas Deposits

[Riaz Haq]

Pakistan is known to have significant natural gas deposits trapped in the form of methane hydrates in sedimentary rocks off the coast of Baluchistan. Tragic as yesterday's earthquake is in terms of loss of human life, it may also have triggered the release of substantial amount of gas which pushed up a new island in the Arabian sea. A team of scientists from the National Institute of Oceanography in Karachi will visit the site this week to investigate it.

In a study published online in the journal Nature Geoscience and reported recently by New York Times, European researchers said that an underwater quake off Pakistan nearly 70 years ago likely fractured seafloor sediments and created pathways for the release of methane gas which still continues to bubble up from below. The researchers say the phenomenon may be widespread enough that climate scientists should take it into account when estimating the amounts of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

Dr. David Fischer, the lead author of the study, told New York Times: “The quake broke open gas-hydrate sediments and the free gas underneath migrated to the surface.” The hydrates themselves did not dissolve. “They remain there,” he said.

While the existence of offshore methane hydrate deposits has long been known in many parts of the world, it's only recently that Japan demonstrated that natural gas can be produced commercially from such deposits.

Methane hydrate is also known by other names such as methane clathrate, hydromethane or methane ice. This last name relates to the fact that it is an ice-like crystalline substance, basically, frozen methane. Methane hydrate is a naturally occurring phenomenon that can be found in soft sediments in Arctic environments. It can be extensively found in the uppermost few hundred meters of slope and rise sediments in continental margins where the right temperature and pressure conditions are present.

Methane hydrates have been discovered on the Atlantic and Pacific margins of both North and South America, especially at equatorial latitudes. They are also found off the coast of Canada, Alaska, off the West coast of Norway, the Black Sea and off the coast of Pakistan. Smaller fields have been discovered off the coast of New Zealand and Antarctica, according to Oceaflores.

One cubic meter of hydrate contains 164 cubic meters of gas, once the gas is released, it expands to more than 150 times the original volume. As a consequence, methane hydrate reserves are thought to contain more than twice as much fuel energy as all currently known fossil fuel reserves.

Methane hydrate is not yet ready for prime time as a substantial source of energy. However, it could become commercially viable in the future for Pakistan if the Japanese succeed in their efforts.  It could be another significant energy revolution similar to the shale revolution now unfolding in America. Pakistan is blessed with both-shale and methane hydrate-in huge quantities enough to fuel the national economy for a long time.

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[Riaz Haq]

The districts of Awaran and Khuzdar where the earthquake hit are the center of Baloch insurgency in Pakistan, according to Washington Post :
Thousands of Pakistanis ran into the streets praying for their lives Tuesday as a powerful earthquake rocked a remote area in the southwest, killing at least 39 people and possibly creating a small island off the coast.

The Pakistani military said it was rushing troops and helicopters to Baluchistan province’s Awaran district, where the quake was centered, and the nearby area of Khuzdar. Local officials said they were sending doctors, food and 1,000 tents for people who had nowhere to sleep as strong aftershocks continued to shake the region.
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The area where the quake struck is at the center of an insurgency that Baluch separatists have been waging against the Pakistani government for years. The separatists regularly attack Pakistani troops and symbols of the state, such as infrastructure projects.

A Pakistani military official speaking on customary condition of anonymity said security officials were fired on while escorting doctors to Awaran. No one was wounded.

The quake was felt as far as New Delhi, the Indian capital, some 1,200 kilometers (about 740 miles) away, but no damage or injuries were immediately reported there.

The quake also jolted Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, roughly 250 kilometers (155 miles) from the epicenter. People in the city’s tall office buildings rushed into the streets, and Pakistani television showed lights swaying as the earth shook.

“My table and computer started shaking. I thought I was feeling dizziness but soon realized they were tremors,” Karachi resident Mohammad Taimur said.

In Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, cellphone vendor Matiullah Khan said he was in his shop with a customer when the cabinet and shelves started to shake.

“I along with customers rushed out to the main street. ... Thousands of people were standing, many in fear and reciting Quranic verses,” he said.

Baluchistan and neighboring Iran are prone to earthquakes. A magnitude-7.8 quake centered just across the border in Iran killed at least 35 people in Pakistan last April.

___

Santana reported from Islamabad. Associated Press writers Zarar Khan and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad, Adil Jawad in Karachi, and Ashok Sharma in New Delhi contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/pakistani-official...

[Riaz Haq]

NBC News on relief effort after Balochistan quake:

Most of the food and shelter provided to displaced people is being provided by Jamaat ud Dawa - or Party of the Faithful - the fundraising arm of banned militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiyeba, whose leadership is wanted by the U.S. for sponsoring terror.

Those difficulties were underlined Thursday when rockets were fired at a government helicopter as it passed over Mushke, an area dominated by militants.

The aircraft was carrying the head of the country's National Disaster Management Authority, a Pakistani army general in charge of relief operations and other officials, The Associated Press reported.
The quake was so powerful that it caused an island to emerge off the coast of the port city of Gwadar, in the Arabian Sea....

Tuesday’s magnitude 7.7 quake struck a remote, under-developed area gripped by separatist militants and the region’s lawlessness is hampering army-led relief efforts.

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/26/20702945-militants-fi...

[Riaz Haq]

Here's an excerpt of Discovery News story on Pakistan's recent quake along Chaman fault:

In the hours after the quake, a new island suddenly rose offshore in shallow seas near the town of Gwadar, about 230 miles (380 kilometers) southwest of the epicenter. Geologists with the Pakistan Navy have collected samples from the rocky pile, the Associated Press reported. From pictures and descriptions, many scientists think the mound is a mud volcano, which often erupt after strong earthquakes near the Arabian Sea. A second island has also been reported offshore of Ormara, about 170 miles (280 km) east of Gwadar, Geo News said.

"Other mud volcanoes have been triggered at this distance for similar size earthquakes," Michael Manga, a geophysicist and expert on mud volcanoes at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

Little known risk
The unexplained island may have focused unusual global attention on the earthquake, which hit in a region that frequently experiences devastating temblors. (Video: Island Appears After Pakistan Earthquake)

But despite the hazards faced by millions living near the Chaman Fault, a combination of geography and politics means the seismic zone remains little studied. The Taliban killed 10 climbers, including an American, in northern Pakistan in June.

"Its location is in an area that is very difficult to do any traditional field work," Khan told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. "I tried twice to submit proposals to (the National Science Foundation) and I got excellent reviews, but the review panel said I was risking my life to work in that area."

But the National Academy of Sciences felt differently. With their support, Khan and his colleagues in Pakistan and at the University of Cincinnati are now studying the fault's current and past movement. This will help the researchers forecast future earthquake risk.

"This fault has had very little work and no paleoseismology," Khan said. "It is really important."

Pakistan's deadly earthquakes owe their birth to the juncture of three colliding tectonic plates: Indian, Eurasian and Arabian. The Indian and Eurasian plates grind past each other along the Chaman Fault, triggering destructive temblors.

Earthquakes along the Chaman Fault are more frequent in the north than in the south, Khan said. Similar to California's San Andreas Fault or Turkey's East Anatolian Fault, in some spots, the massive plate boundary is not a single fracture. In southern Pakistan, the Chaman Fault splits into more than one strand, weaving a braid of many smaller faults. The differences between north and south influence the number of earthquakes.

In the past 40 years, only one quake bigger than magnitude 6.0 has jiggled southern Pakistan within 125 miles (200 km) of yesterday's shaker, according to the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology in Seattle. (High & Dry: Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau)

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Altogether, the strike-slip Chaman Fault spans more than 500 miles (860 kilometers), crossing through Afghanistan and Pakistan. Strike-slip faults move each side of the fracture mostly parallel to each other.

In the north, near the town of Chaman where India jabs a knuckle into Pakistan, the fault has zipped along at 33 millimeters (1.3 inches) every year for the past 38,000 years, according to a study Khan's team published Sept. 12 in the journal Tectonophysics.

"That is very fast," Khan said. "That tells me there were multiple major earthquakes in the last 38,000 years.".

http://news.discovery.com/earth/rocks-fossils/what-caused-pakistan-...

[Riaz Haq]

Here's a BBC report on methane hydrates:

The world is addicted to hydrocarbons, and it's easy to see why - cheap, plentiful and easy to mine, they represent an abundant energy source to fuel industrial development the world over.

The side-effects, however, are potentially devastating; burning fossil fuels emits the CO2 linked to global warming.

And as reserves of oil, coal and gas are becoming tougher to access, governments are looking ever harder for alternatives, not just to produce energy, but to help achieve the holy grail of all sovereign states - energy independence.

Some have discovered a potential saviour, locked away under deep ocean beds and vast swathes of permafrost. The problem is it's a hydrocarbon, but unlike any other we know.

Huge reserves
Otherwise known as fire ice, methane hydrate presents as ice crystals with natural methane gas locked inside. They are formed through a combination of low temperatures and high pressure, and are found primarily on the edge of continental shelves where the seabed drops sharply away into the deep ocean floor, as the US Geological Survey map shows.

And the deposits of these compounds are enormous. "Estimates suggest that there is about the same amount of carbon in methane hydrates as there is in every other organic carbon store on the planet," says Chris Rochelle of the British Geological Survey.

In other words, there is more energy in methane hydrates than in all the world's oil, coal and gas put together.

By lowering the pressure or raising the temperature, the hydrate simply breaks down into water and methane - a lot of methane.

One cubic metre of the compound releases about 160 cubic metres of gas, making it a highly energy-intensive fuel. This, together with abundant reserves and the relatively simple process of releasing the methane, means a number of governments are getting increasingly excited about this massive potential source of energy.

Technical challenges
The problem, however, is accessing the hydrates.

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Quite apart from reaching them at the bottom of deep ocean shelves, not to mention operating at low temperatures and extremely high pressure, there is the potentially serious issue of destabilising the seabed, which can lead to submarine landslides.

A greater potential threat is methane escape. Extracting the gas from a localised area of hydrates does not present too many difficulties, but preventing the breakdown of hydrates and subsequent release of methane in surrounding structures is more difficult.

And escaping methane has serious consequences for global warming - recent studies suggest the gas is 30 times more damaging than CO2.

These technical challenges are the reason why, as yet, there is no commercial-scale production of methane hydrate anywhere in the world. But a number of countries are getting close.

The US, Canada and Japan have all ploughed millions of dollars into research and have carried out a number of test projects, while South Korea, India and China are also looking at developing their reserves.

The US launched a national research and development programme as far back as 1982, and by 1995 had completed its assessment of gas hydrate resources. It has since instigated pilot projects in the Blake Ridge area off the coast of South Carolina, on the Alaska North Slope and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, with five projects still running.....

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27021610

[Riaz Haq]

#NepalEarthquake: #Pakistan Air Force Relief Plane Crew Caught in Aftershock http://nbcnews.to/1EMztNN via @NBCNews

KATHMANDU, Nepal — Landing a plane laden with aid in earthquake-struck Nepal proved particularly hair-raising for a Pakistan Air Force crew on Tuesday who touched down right as an aftershock hit.

Ahmad Bilal, Pakistan Air Force Squadron Leader, said that "right in the middle" of an exchange with air traffic control while the plane taxied, the controller stopped talking.

"I thought my [comms were] out," Bilal told NBC News minutes after landing his American-made Hercules aircraft at Kathmandu airport. "We were just rolling around. And then [the controller] comes back, 15 minutes later. He had run off because of the aftershocks."

Bilal successfully landed 40 tons of aid, 18 Pakistani engineers and two search-and-rescue dogs to find those caught up in Saturday's devastating 7.8-magnitude quake. The crew then unloaded the aid as a tremor violently shook the flight.

"When we stopped and were unloading all the supplies, and I was warming things down in the instruments, I read around a 30 degree lurch to the left and then a 30 degree right. On a stationary aircraft that weighs 150,000 pounds," technician Sanaullah Khan said. "Then the whole plane was lurched four feet forward. That's when, in the distance, a building collapsed and the dust raced towards us. It was like a sandstorm it came so fast."

Seeing the devastation on the ground prompted the seven-man crew to give away the food and water they had brought with them to the earthquake victims.

[Riaz Haq]

#Pakistan orders AW139 twin-engine helicopters for search and rescue. Adds to 11 Pratt & Whitney PT6-powered helis

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/pakistan-orders-aw139s-f...

Pakistan has ordered an undisclosed number of AgustaWestland AW139 intermediate twin-engined helicopters configured for search and rescue missions.

Deliveries are due to start in 2017, says parent company Leonardo-Finmeccanica, with the deal part of a fleet renewal programme “spread over several batches”, it adds. Signed in Islamabad, the contract also covers its provision of personnel training and logistics support.


A total of 11 of the Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6-powered helicopters are already operated in Pakistan. Of this number, Flightglobal's Fleets Analyzer database records five as used by the government for disaster relief and transportation missions.

[Riaz Haq]

The rapidly populating coastal region from the Gulf to Pakistan faces a huge tsunami risk

That tsunamis can cause death and devastation has become painfully clear over the past two decades. On Boxing Day, 2004, a magnitude 9 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra caused waves several metres high to devastate the Indian Ocean – killing more than 230,000 people in 14 countries. In 2011, another magnitude 9 earthquake, this time off Japan, produced waves up to 20 metres in height, flooding the Fukushima nuclear reactor. It killed more than 15,000 people.

A new study, published in Geophysical Journal International, by my colleagues and me suggests that a 1,000km long fault at the northern end of the Arabian Sea may pose a similar threat.

The Makran, as the southern coastal region of Iran and Pakistan is known, is a subduction zone. In such regions, one of the Earth’s tectonic plates is dragged beneath another, forming a giant fault known as a “megathrust”. As the plates move past each other, they can get stuck, causing stress to build up. At some point the stress becomes high enough that the megathrust breaks in an earthquake.

This was exactly what caused the Sumatra 2004 and Tohoku 2011 earthquakes. When a megathrust moves suddenly, the whole seafloor is offset and the water has to move out of the way over a huge area. This sets off waves with particular characteristics that can cross entire oceans: tsunamis. The phenomenon, along with their potentially large size, makes subduction zone earthquakes particularly dangerous.

https://theconversation.com/the-rapidly-populating-coastal-region-f...

But just because a part of a subduction zone produces earthquakes doesn’t mean that the whole megathrust can move in one go. We often see that stress builds up at different rates on different parts of the fault, with some parts sliding smoothly past each other. How much of a megathrust can move in one go is important because it determines the size of the resulting earthquake. The amount that the Makran megathrust can move in earthquakes has been a longstanding question, but the hostile climate and challenging politics of the region have made research there difficult.

We know that the eastern part of the Makran megathrust (in Pakistan) can produce large earthquakes. A magnitude 8.1 quake off the coast of western Pakistan in 1945 caused a tsunami which killed about 300 people along the coasts of Pakistan and Oman. There have been several smaller earthquakes on the megathrust since, including a magnitude 6 in February this year.

If the western part of the Makran (in Iran) also produces earthquakes – and the whole Makran megathrust were to move in one go – it could produce a magnitude 9 earthquake, similar to those in Sumatra and Tohoku.

However, we have never actually recorded a subduction earthquake in this part of Makran. In fact, there are only records of one candidate quake from 1483 – and the actual location of this is disputed. But it’s important to keep in mind that just because we haven’t seen an earthquake doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be one – particularly since the intervals between earthquakes are often hundreds or thousands of years. Historically, not many people have lived in the remote Iranian Makran, a desert which killed Alexander the Great’s army. So earthquakes might simply not have been documented.

[Riaz Haq]

Huge #gas reserves discovered in #Makran region of #Pakistan. A recent oceanographic survey conducted in the coastal belt found huge gas offshore. reserveshttps://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/393778-major-gas-reserves-discovered-in-makran

Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (JCSC) Gen Zubair Mahmood Hayat on Wednesday revealed that major gas reserves have been discovered along the Makran coast.

Speaking at a conference in Karachi, Gen Zubair said Pakistan is blessed with minerals worth billions of rupees.

A recent oceanographic survey conducted in the coastal belt discovered huge gas reserves, he told the audience in a QA session.

He termed the youth an asset for country's prosperous future. ‘Pakistan can achieve high growth progress through the information technology and social media in e-commerce.’

Pakistan is sitting on ninth biggest shale gas reserves, he further added.