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Comment by tronicdude | Hacker News Reader

Fracking does this on a small scale. I had an excellent geology professor, Donald Prothero, who argued manually triggering earthquakes could be a much better idea in high tension areas than waiting for them to happen organically, as we could prepare, and the triggered earthquakes wouldn’t be as bad as waiting for them to happen. But the paperwork would be a nightmare(:

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Releasing the tension in small quakes every few months must be preferable to letting it pile up and release every few decades.

It would be preferable, but a litigation nightmare. If 100 houses fall down due to a natural earthquake, no one gets sued. If 2 houses fall down in a "prescribed burn" earthquake, now the entity that caused the earthquake can be sued.

Earthquakes triggered by fracking is usually small and non-damaging (less than M5, mostly M4 or M3).

It's actually impossible to know for certain how much and what size of land you're destabilizing. Duration of expected destabilization is also varying I guess and at least 1 year.

Oklahoma, 2012 seismic sequence in Emilia (Italy), Sichuan Basin are already examples that triggered protests and call for investigations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Northern_Italy_earthquake...

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2187718/chin...

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1225942

An example study for US that states the activity is exponantially linked to fracking sites: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10233410

> "Exponential relationship between the total number of earthquakes and the number of wells in the Texas during the study period 1998–2018 with correlation R2=0.726."

In the tragic earthquakes of 2023 in Turkey, this relationship was again discussed in mainstream media: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Turkey%E2%80%93Syria_eart...

It's not fracking itself but actually wastewater injection has a bigger influence in triggering bigger earthquakes according to what I've read. Moreover, it's also known that dams have a significant impact:

https://archive.internationalrivers.org/blogs/227/china-eart....

> "The devastating earthquake in Sichuan, which took at least 69,000 lives in May 2008, may have been unleashed by the huge Zipingpu Dam. New scientific evidence suggests that the filling of the Zipingpu reservoir may have activated a dormant fault line near the dam site."

Shallow faults are definitely activated. Probability of deep faults activated through full destabilization of a region? Unknown for now.

Fracking triggers earthquakes, but not on demand.

Another issue is that an earthquake in one location can trigger an earthquake in another.

Also who would cover the legal liability in case of damages?

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