Earthquakes – Fracking at Fault?
January 14, 2015
Think back to elementary school, when you would tuck yourself underneath your desk for earthquake drills. Your teacher would turn off the lights and tell everyone to stop talking. You would hold this uncomfortable position for what felt like hours, until there was an announcement over the intercom, telling you that the earthquake drill was over. Yet, living in Texas, you had no idea what an actual earthquake felt like, or had even experienced one before. That is quickly changing, especially for the people living in Irving.
After 15 quakes in one week alone, from the magnitudes of 2.5 to 3.6, people want an explanation. And the most obvious one is fracking. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the process of extracting natural gas from shale rock within the earth by drilling and injecting fluid into the ground. Some scientists are hesitant to place the blame on fracking, saying they don’t want to jump to conclusions, but the process of injecting fluid into the ground has been proven to shake things up.
Scientists are looking for faults underneath Irving, but the progress is slow going. There isn’t much earthquake-related information about Texas because there haven’t been many earthquakes in Texas before. Faults have not been mapped or discovered because there was no need. Now that there is a need, scientists are rushing to find this information, but every piece seems to lead back to fracking.
“That’s a fundamental change in tectonic events, which tend to behave in a predictable way, so it has to be driven by something,” said Elizabeth Cochran, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, California. “It suggests that there could be some sort of forcing, which would potentially point to injection.”
Though hard evidence that the oil industry’s fracking has caused the recent earthquakes has not yet been found, that is what most people—scientists and uneducated hillbillies alike—believe.
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