Lloyd’s of London insurer Hiscox claims that there was an “unnatural number of natural catastrophes” in 2010, delivering a 36% decline in the company’s profit margins. More specifically, Hiscox enumerates 910 such disasters in 2010, a tenfold increase over 2009.
Profits tumbled by £109m to £211, due to an “unnatural number of natural catastrophes”. Hiscox believes there were 960 such disasters in 2010, 10 times more than the year before.
An unusually strong earthquake struck near Guy, Arkansas, late Sunday night. Registering 4.7 on the Richter Scale, the tremor is the latest of literally thousands of quakes that have plagued central Arkansas in the last few years.
Some people suspect that “fracking” disposal might be the catalyst for the recent and peculiar swarm of earthquakes in that area. Natural gas drilling into the Fayetteville Shale deposits use hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to force out methane trapped within the rock located underground. The waste water is then disposed by forcing it deep underground through high pressure injection wells.
Arkansas state geologists are currently investigating the possibility that injection wells are producing the seismic instability.