Secondary technology of Tier N/A
|Buildings enabled||Archimedes Lever|
- "John Henry pulled out two 5-pound nano-oscillators, one for each side of the fault. They shook and shook, the earth trembling everywhere. Half an hour later, John Henry had shook himself up a mountain, while the industrial engineers had only managed a tiny hill."
- The Uncle Nevercloned Stories
Induced seismicity of low magnitudes has traditionally been an inadvertent byproduct of industrial operations on or near the crustal surface of Old Earth. In the past, small earthquakes and surface subsidence has been caused by extensive extraction or injection of fluids (such as oil or waste water), mining, deep-water reservoirs (where hydraulics can cause in-situ stresses along an existing fault), and geothermal drilling. Colonial geologists are now studying these same methods to induce seismic activity on this planet as an aid to terraforming. Having mapped the major fault lines, propagation of directed seismic waves might serve to bring ore- or petroleum-bearing rock to the surface, alter water courses, relieve crustal stresses, trigger cryoseism at the poles, and other phenomena leading to beneficial changes in the landscape.