I found a New York Times article about man-made earthquakes, called Drilling is Making Oklahoma as Quake Prone as California. I didn’t know that humans could cause earthquakes by drilling. After reading this weeks lesson I was intrigued by the impacts of these earthquakes. I knew that shifting of plate tectonics could cause earthquakes but after reading this article I was really surprised at the lengths that we humans are going to to have oil and fossil fuels. By drilling in these areas like Oklahoma, they are now prone to earthquakes as bad as California.
The article says that the area that is at greater risk is the land along the Oklahoma-Kansas border, and it has been repeatedly rocked by tremors. Much of the regions boom in oil and gas production comes from hydraulic fracturing of shale deep in the Earth, this process is also called fracking. This year Oklahoma has recorded more than 160 earthquakes with a magnitude of 3 or more. These tremors that they have had over the last 5 years have rivaled the largest in the histories. The pace of these earthquakes have seemed to slowed down a little after the state’s oil and gas regulator, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. They effectively imposed steep reductions in underground waste disposal earlier this year.
I know that there are some places in Pennsylvania that practices fracking, and after reading what it is doing to Oklahoma, I’m worried that it could happen in PA too. This article just shows another way that we have influencing our planet. The effects of burning fossil fuels are known, and now we know that the process of getting our oil is hurting our environment as well. This article really changed the way that I look at earthquakes.
Wines, M. (2016, March 28). Drilling Is Making Oklahoma as Quake Prone as California. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/us/earthquake-risk-in-oklahoma-and-kansas-comparable-to-california.html