Wastewater Injection Caused Oklahoma Earthquakes

A study published Thursday in Science explains how wastewater injection sites—areas where toxic water left over from oil drilling and fracking processes is injected into the ground between impermeable layers of rocks to avoid polluting freshwater—could be driving the sharp increase in the sometimes-disastrous earthquake events.  “It really is unprecedented to have this many earthquakes over a broad region like this,” says study co-author Geoffrey Abers of Cornell University.  “Most big sequences of earthquakes that we see are either a main shock and a lot of aftershocks or it might be right at the middle of a volcano in a volcanic system or geothermal system.  So you might see little swarms but nothing really this distributed and this persistent.”

Wastewater Injection Caused Oklahoma Earthquakes