In a surprising turn of events, Cuadrilla Resources, a British energy company, recently admitted that its hydraulic fracturing operations "likely" caused an earthquake in England. Predictably, this news quickly sent a shockwave through the U.K., the oil and natural gas industries, and the environmental activist community. And it certainly feeds plenty of speculation that the same phenomenon could be occurring elsewhere.
Speculation that would be well-founded, evidently. Right on the heels of Cuadrilla's announcement, news is spreading that the United States Geological Survey has released a report (pdf) that links a series of earthquakes in Oklahoma last January to a fracking operation underway there. Evidently, a resident reported feeling some minor earthquakes, spurring the USGS to investigate. They found that some 50 small earthquakes had indeed been registered, ranging in magnitude from 1.0 to 2.8. The bulk of these occurred within 2.1 miles of Eola Field, a fracking operation in southern Garvin County.
The U.S.G.S. determined that "from the character of the seismic recordings indicate that they are both shallow and unique."
From the report:
Our analysis showed that shortly after hydraulic fracturing began small earthquakes started occurring, and more than 50 were identified, of which 43 were large enough to be located. Most of these earthquakes occurred within a 24 hour period after hydraulic fracturing operations had ceased. There have been previous cases where seismologists have suggested a link between hydraulic fracturing and earthquakes, but data was limited, so drawing a definitive conclusion was not possible for these cases
8 comments:
don't frack anywhere! sorry but i don't think we are going to wake up as a species... dolts. nothing will change until a great number of people, in this country, die and we can unequivocally correlate their deaths to one of these stupid things we are doing. what are the chances of that? nil. our poor children
jeff and i were talking some months back about the possibility of these earthquakes being caused by fracking... it just makes sense. AND i can't believe that the media people were clueless about what Gerry was talking about!!! have they had their heads buried in the sand???
Ok, now we need to commission a study to see if more earthquakes is a bad thing.
unbefuckinglievable! ... it doesn't exactly make me proud, but at least our idiots fessed up. HOW is this still going on? I don't know much, but this just seems such a no-brainer bad thing. This just keeps flying under the radar, but I've no idea how?????
BUI (blogging Under the Influence... again!.. I'm afraid it was a bit of Sunday sparkling!)
I KNOW!!! You guys!!!! What are we going to do?!?!?
I'm not sure how anyone can think Fracking is a good idea unless they are stupid and greedy. Just my two cents.
Yeah. Scary. Bob Burtman did an investigative report about this and came to the conclusion that there is no way to frak friendly! Eeeek!
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