4.7 Magnitude Quake Hits Central Arkansas

via ozarksfirst.com

USGS: Eathquake Hits Central Arkansas, Ground Shakes In NWA - NW Arkansas News Story - KHBS NW Arkansas

The U.S. Geological Survey reported a 4.7 magnitude earthquake in the Greenbrier area at 11:00 p.m. Sunday.

Residents across northwest Arkansas and Oklahoma called the 40/29 newsroom and reported feeling the earthquake.

via 4029tv.com

Magnitude 4.7 - ARKANSAS - USGS Report

Earthquake Summary

Tectonic Summary

EARTHQUAKES IN THE STABLE CONTINENTAL REGION
Most of North America east of the Rocky Mountains has infrequent earthquakes. Here and there earthquakes are more numerous, for example in the New Madrid seismic zone centered on southeastern Missouri, in the Charlevoix-Kamouraska seismic zone of eastern Quebec, in New England, in the New York - Philadelphia - Wilmington urban corridor, and elsewhere. However, most of the enormous region from the Rockies to the Atlantic can go years without an earthquake large enough to be felt, and several U.S. states have never reported a damaging earthquake. The earthquakes that do occur strike anywhere at irregular intervals.

Earthquakes east of the Rocky Mountains, although less frequent than in the West, are typically felt over a much broader region. East of the Rockies, an earthquake can be felt over an area as much as ten times larger than a similar magnitude earthquake on the west coast. A magnitude 4.0 eastern U.S. earthquake typically can be felt at many places as far as 100 km (60 mi) from where it occurred, and it infrequently causes damage near its source. A magnitude 5.5 eastern U.S. earthquake usually can be felt as far as 500 km (300 mi) from where it occurred, and sometimes causes damage as far away as 40 km (25 mi).

FAULTS
Earthquakes everywhere occur on faults within bedrock, usually miles deep. Most of the region's bedrock was formed as several generations of mountains rose and were eroded down again over the last billion or so years.

At well-studied plate boundaries like the San Andreas fault system in California, often scientists can determine the name of the specific fault that is responsible for an earthquake. In contrast, east of the Rocky Mountains this is rarely the case. All parts of this vast region are far from the nearest plate boundaries, which, for the U.S., are to the east in the center of the Atlantic Ocean, to the south in the Caribbean Sea, and to the west in California and offshore from Washington and Oregon. The region is laced with known faults but numerous smaller or deeply buried faults remain undetected. Even most of the known faults are poorly located at earthquake depths. Accordingly, few earthquakes east of the Rockies can be linked to named faults. It is difficult to determine if a known fault is still active and could slip and cause an earthquake. In most areas east of the Rockies, the best guide to earthquake hazards is the earthquakes themselves.

Earthquake Information for Arkansas

via earthquake.usgs.gov

4.7 Magnitude Earthquake Hits Arkansas

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Action News 5
Breaking News...A magnitude 4.7 Earthquake just shook parts of Arkansas. The quake was roughly 4 miles from Guy and Greenbrier and 37 miles away from Little Rock.

Libya Unrest Lifts Oil Prices and Raises Questions

But the events unfolding in the Arab world, the epicenter of global oil production, are a sobering reminder that trading in oil, that mother of all commodities, is at heart a political game. Not since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 have the politics of crude loomed so large. Like much of the Arab world, this market seems like a pocket full of firecrackers, just waiting for a match.

As rebels tightened their noose around Tripoli on Sunday, its critical oil supplies remained constricted. Production from most of Libya’s oil fields was down to a trickle. Several ports and refineries were left stricken by workers too afraid to go to work. And with most foreign oil company employees having left the country and armed men beginning to loot equipment left behind, a return to normal production appears weeks away at best.

About 80 percent of the nation’s oil production lies in rebel-held territory, though there is not a way to verify how much rebel leaders directly control.

Still, what has brought us to $100-a-barrel oil again — and set people on edge — goes beyond the possibility that the uprisings that toppled autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia might spread to other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in the Middle East.

For the moment, heavyweights like Saudi Arabia can make up the difference, and big consumers, like the United States, have stored millions of barrels of oil for just this kind of emergency.

But few oil experts are surprised that the unrest has so unnerved the market. The world is thirsty for oil, and supply and demand are in delicate balance.

There is little room for more disruptions in

supplies. Indeed, spare capacity — essentially that amount of extra oil that OPEC members are able to produce in a pinch — is now about five million barrels a day. That is about 6 percent of the oil that the world consumes every day. That cushion is greater than in 2008, when it equaled about 2 percent of daily consumption, but it remains worryingly thin. And that is not even taking into account the loss of about one million barrels a day exported from Libya.

“There is a vulnerability to tightness,” said David Knapp, senior energy economist at Energy Intelligence, a specialized publisher. “But for now, there are enough barrels out there in commercial storage and OPEC’s spare capacity and strategic reserves held by industrial countries to handle a medium-duration outage from Libya.”

The question on everyone’s mind is what if this goes beyond Libya. Costanza Jacazio, an energy analyst at Barclays Capital in New York, says further unrest — or simply fear of further unrest — could well drive oil prices higher. “The degree of geopolitical risk now is massive.”

Jan Stuart, an energy economist at Macquarie Securities, explained: “This brings back the political dimension to oil-price dynamics. For the best part of the past 25 years, the Saudis have bent backwards to make sure politics would be banned from discussions about oil supplies. The risk today is we could go back the other way again.”

The price of oil had been rising steadily even before the wave of pro-democracy protests swept much of the Middle East and North Africa. A recovering global economy had convinced traders that demand for oil was going to rise by about 2 percent in 2011. Some industry experts and Wall Street seers were predicting a gradual march back to $120 and even $150. The thinking was that investors would pour money into the commodity markets.

Oil futures in New York jumped nearly $12 last week to settle at $97.88 a barrel, their highest since October 2008; in London, benchmark Brent crude traded close to $115 a barrel.

Now economists worry that high and rising energy prices could hurt the economy just as it is beginning to revive. The price of gasoline averaged $3.29 a gallon on Friday, up from $3.11 a month ago. As a rule, every 1-cent increase takes more than $1 billion out of consumers’ pockets a year.

If prices keep climbing, consumers will in all likelihood tighten their belts. If prices stay high for long, the impact could be severe: every oil shock of the past 40 years has helped push the global economy into recession. Nariman Behravesh, senior economist at IHS Global Insight, said that every $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil reduces economic growth by two-tenths of a percentage point after one year and a full percentage point over two years.

In some ways, something like this was bound to happen. This is not a “black swan” event — a sudden, unexpected occurrence — but a white swan one, said Michael A. Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“You can’t predict what the specific disruption there will be, but you can be sure there will be some disruption,” he said.

To calm markets, Saudi Arabia has started to increase its crude output to more than nine million barrels a day, roughly 700,000 barrels more than at the end of 2010, Energy Intelligence reported. Saudi officials are also asking European refiners, who are most directly affected by the drop in Libyan exports, how much and what grades of crude they need for quick shipment.

And the International Energy Agency, an organization of consuming countries, also helped defuse tensions in the markets when it said Thursday that the world had “the tools at hand to deliver adequate oil to the market,” including the availability of emergency stocks held by consuming nations.

Much now hinges on what happens next in the Middle East. The price spikes that accompanied the two Persian Gulf wars did not have deep impacts because of they did not last long enough. But several oil price increases have preceded economic downturns.

The biggest shock followed the 1973-74 OPEC embargo, which quadrupled oil prices and helped produce stagflation, a period of slow growth, high unemployment and inflation.

The 1979 Iranian revolution caused another shortage, and again American motorists were forced to wait in long lines for gasoline. Oil prices surged, but they did not stay elevated for long, as Mexico, Nigeria and Venezuela expanded production and OPEC lost its unity. Oil prices remained low for years, and the economy through the later half of the 1980s and most of the 1990s was generally strong.

If the current unrest helps drive the price of a barrel up by $40 to $50, back to its level of three years ago, that would really hurt.

“If gasoline prices go over $4 a gallon, there could be a big psychological effect,” Mr. Behravesh said, “but it would have to last.”

via nytimes.com

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Chinese police face down Middle East-style protests: Premier Wen Jiabao, meanwhile, used a morning Internet... http://twurl.nl/7gcq3w

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via bbc.co.uk

Chinese police face down Middle East-style protests

Premier Wen Jiabao, meanwhile, used a morning Internet chat to promise to purge senior officials who are corrupt and to rein in inflation and rising home prices, directly addressing some of the most common grievances of ordinary Chinese.

Since the January uprising in Tunisia spurred similar anti-government protests across the Middle East and North Africa, threatening long-entrenched authoritarian regimes, China's Communist rulers have reacted nervously, with both defensive and aggressive tactics.

Officials have used state-run media outlets to dismiss any comparisons with China while at the same time stepping up public comments on the need to address "social conflict" and to tackle problems such as the growing income disparity between the rich and poor. They have also detained a number of activists and human rights lawyers, blocked Internet search terms considered sensitive, such as "Egypt," "Tunisia" and even U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr.'s Chinese name. And they have issued warnings to foreign journalists to be mindful of reporting restrictions.

A previously unknown group has used an overseas-based Chinese language Web site to call for a series of peaceful, silent protests, named "jasmine rallies" after the Tunisian uprising, on consecutive Sunday afternoons in cities across China. The rallies were called for heavily trafficked commercial areas, public squares and parks, ostensibly so silent protesters could blend in with ordinary passersby to avoid arrest.

However, police on Sunday were out in huge numbers in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities at the sites where the rallies were supposed to take place. At the Wangfujing area of Beijing, a bustling commercial street with a McDonald's and a Gap store and close to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, blue-uniformed police officers and security volunteers with red armbands lined the streets. Other policemen patrolled with German Shepherd dogs, and a water truck normally used for street cleaning traversed back and forth.

Police in Beijing stopped some foreigners and asked for identification, turning away journalists from entering the area. At 2:30 p.m., about a half-hour after the scheduled start of the silent protest walk, officers blocked off the entrance to Wangfujing Street with police tape. The unusually heavy police presence seemed to attract curious onlookers who snapped pictures with cellphone cameras.

At the Peace Cinema in Shanghai, opposite the People's Square near the city's main municipal building, a few hundred people tried to gather. Policemen used loud whistles and loudspeakers to keep the crowd moving, and police converged whenever a group of more than a dozen people appeared to be forming. A street-cleaning vehicle spraying bursts of water also kept crowds at bay.

Some people in Shanghai said they heard about the "jasmine rally" and came to see if there would be any public speaker. Some openly complained about government corruption and the need for an opening of the system.

"I came here today to see how people protest against the government, which is corrupt and rules in an authoritarian way," said a 71-year-old man, who asked that only his family name, Cao, be used. "Democracy is the trend in the world. No country in the world can be an exception to the process."

Cao said the Communist Party in China was so strong that he expected reform would have to come from within the system. "For those fighting against the government, it is like eggs hitting the stone," Cao said. "With 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 eggs hitting the stone, the eggs will eventually succeed."

Another man, named Xia, 64, said there were about 400 to 500 people gathering at People's Square when he arrived around 1 p.m., but they were dispersed by the spray from the water truck. He said he would keep returning to try to protest because he was already in his 60s and not afraid.

via washingtonpost.com