Search

The article discusses the fracking technique for extracting oil and gas from shales in the U.S. Topics discussed include increase in the annual production of natural gas in the U.S. which led to lower prices of gas, consequence of the drop in natural gas prices has been the substitution of natural gas for coal in electric power generation plants and adds that oil and gas formation in black shales increase fluid pressure which results in hydraulic forces leading to fractures.

Observations suggest that contemporary wildfire suppression practices in the United States have contributed to conditions that facilitate large, destructive fires. We introduce a forest-fire model with natural fire resistance that supports this theory. Fire resistance is defined with respect to the size and shape of clusters; the model yields power-law frequency-size distributions of model fires that are consistent with field observations in the United States, Canada, and Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]