The arrival of man-made earthquakes

I would think most of these earthquakes are the vertical-movement variety, whereas tectonic sliding horizontal movement earthquakes are the much larger and dangerous kind, and may not be affected by any release of tension like these man made ones may be creating.

Unfortunately, while small earthquakes can relieve stress, the amount of energy they displace is inconsequential in terms of the most destructive earthquakes.

You would need 1 million magnitude-3 earthquakes to release the equivalent amount of energy from a single magnitude-7 quake. You'd need 33 million magnitude-3s to release the equivalent energy from a magnitude-8, etc.

Keep in mind that the bigger earthquakes are caused by wastewater injection, not fracking.

> Many of the larger earthquakes are caused by disposal wells, where the billions of barrels of brackish water brought up by drilling for oil and gas are pumped back into the ground. (Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—in which chemically treated water is injected into the earth to fracture rocks in order to access oil and gas reserves—causes smaller earthquakes, almost always less than 3.0.)

Wastewater injection is usually a result of oil and gas drilling, but it's not the same thing as fracking.

Checked the original article: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5912/322.full And I cannot see a clear conclusion, just wait for more data and see. More updates for that recently?

I think it's similar to the reasoning for "We aren't going to trigger the Yellowstone Supervolcano with the Tesla Model 3" and "We aren't going to trigger the Yellowstone Supervolcano with new vegan egg replacements" — we just don't have any good reason to believe it will happen.

The references to money buying political influence are both brief and relevant. I don't see how you could write a credible article on this topic without observing the existence of powerful economic incentives.

(Edit: I originally wrote 'credible argument' which doesn't make much sense)

The oil business is interesting to economists because the real world market comes quite close to the economic model of perfect competition; it's fast and cheap to set up or shut down a well (relative to the value of the oil one may extract), the commodity is standardized and fungible, there are enough producers in the market that they exist as price-takers, and the price of oil is widely known and tracked throughout the economy - far better then any other single commodity. Why wouldn't you consider the economic factors in a story like this?

Because the money is the important thing. These earthquakes are a product of oil production, and they have a negative impact on people in those communities. Oil production makes a small number of people very rich, and those people use that money to buy political influence, which means that the state continues to allow them to do something that has strong negative externalities, and doesn't force them to appropriately compensate those who are affected.

As the article states, up until 2008 Oklahoma averaged 1 earthquake per year of magnitude 3.0 or greater. In 2014 there were over 500.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/oklahoma/image...

I don't think anyone really disputes that there are an increasing number of earthquakes, both in Oklahoma and elsewhere.

http://www.usgs.gov/blogs/features/files/2013/07/2013-hockey...

Like cancer, once can show that something causes an increased rate of earthquakes (on top of an underlying base rate) even if no individual earthquake can be definitively attributed to that cause.

> A team of USGS scientists led by Bill Ellsworth analyzed changes in the rate of earthquake occurrence using large USGS databases of earthquakes recorded since 1970. The increase in seismicity has been found to coincide with the injection of wastewater in deep disposal wells in several locations, including Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Ohio. Much of this wastewater is a byproduct of oil and gas production and is routinely disposed of by injection into wells specifically designed and approved for this purpose.

> Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as “fracking,” does not appear to be linked to the increased rate of magnitude 3 and larger earthquakes.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/induced/

"Oklahoma is a seismically active region that has always had a lot of earthquakes in the magnitude 5 range."

I don't think the historical record supports this assertion, for any reasonable interpretation of "a lot". I found this table:

http://paleoseismicity.org/m5-6-earthquake-in-oklahoma/

showing only one earthquake of >= M5 in Oklahoma in the last 70 years (an M5.5 in 1952). That is, excluding the ramp-up since 2008 and in particular the Prague, OK M5.6 (2011).

This sparse historical record of M5 earthquakes is also supported by the linked graph from USGS (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/induced/) that shows about 20 events/year of M3 or larger in the entire central-eastern US (pre-2009 -- the rate increases after 2005-2009).

The simple version of the Gutenberg-Richter relation predicts 10x fewer earthquakes for each unit jump in M. So, very roughly, that would imply 0.2 earthquakes per year of M5 or above across the central-eastern US, a region much larger than Oklahoma. The actual rate observed in the 20th century appears significantly lower than this.

As someone who has lived in OK for 30+ years, this is absolutely false.

Here is a chart of the largest recorded earthquakes in Oklahoma. Only two have been greater than 5.0.

http://www.okgeosurvey1.gov/pages/earthquakes/information.ph...

Also note how many have occurred in the past 5 years.

"We've always been at war with Eastasia."

-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

One of the key differences between Oklahoma & California earthquakes is the relative depth of quakes of significant magnitude.

Quakes caused by tectonic plate interaction and those possibly caused by fluid injection may not be usefully comparable - but ask a seismologist, or at least a geologist, not a journalist, or a random internet commenter.

There's a nice interactive quake map at:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map

edit: Pasting a long (512+ chars) URL did not work well, but use the settings sprocket and the checkboxes for US Faults & Hazards.

BTW, the hot spot in the Missouri/Arkansas area is the "New Madrid" fault, locally pronounced with the stress on the first syllable: "Mad-rid" not "Mu-drid". It makes emergency preparedness folks nervous because it had a big quake in the early 1800s, very little since, and now has lot of brick construction - sigh.