
Is A Monster Conveyer Belt Causing Earthquakes In Texas?
The world's 2nd longest conveyer belt stretches over 40 miles across west Texas and it may be helping to cause earthquakes throughout the region.
The lone star state loves its "everything is bigger in Texas" image and certainly lives up to it. We have the worlds biggest cowboy boots and the worlds biggest nut.
We even have the worlds biggest food portions and the biggest official state animal as well as a huge urban park. We also do a lot of "fracking" which is why this massive conveyer belt was built.
Fracking uses water, sand and chemicals, blasted under super high pressure into rock formations, to release oil and natural gas trapped inside. Fracking has been linked to recent earthquakes in west Texas. The conveyer belt helps delivers the sand and was described by a reporter for Texas Monthly this way:
$400 million worth of concrete, electronics, and steel assembled to rotate a thick rubber belt along roughly 66,000 metal rollers. Something on the order of 13 million tons of sand can be carried the entire length of the machine—42 miles—each year. If all of that were used to build sandcastles, you could have a couple of dozen the size of Buckingham Palace, with more than enough left over for a Taj Mahal. - Texas Monthly
How Is The Conveyer Belt Causing Earthquakes?
Fracking calls for a lot of sand, just one well can use 400 truckloads of it, hence the need for this big ass belt to help get it loaded and brought to well sites. See pics here.
Helping to facilitate the freaking fracking process is how the belt may be a contributing factor that, inadvertently, is helping to cause these earthquakes. Not the sole reason, of course, but it's a part of the puzzle.
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