Over the weekend Oklahoma suffered a 5.0 magnitude earthquake. Normally something like this wouldn’t even be a blip in the news, except that it happened just a few miles from Cushing. The same Cushing where the US has a half trillion barrels of oil in storage. And that should be deeply troubling. Those tanks are not built to withstand earthquakes, and why should they be. They are in Oklahoma, not normally a hotspot of seismic activity. Except that in recent years it has become one. And all of it can be traced directly to the oil and gas industry. Oklahoma is the poster child of hydraulic fracturing, so it is no surprise that they are the first place to feel the negative effects of it. It has long been established that pumping fracking fluid into the ground will contaminate drinking water, but the earthquakes are a new phenomenon. It turns out that fracturing rock and then pumping waste water deep underground will mess with fault lines and create man made earth quakes. This has been going on for years, but the quakes have been mostly so small that they are only perceptible to seismometers. They are now ramping up. Multiple quakes have now happened over a 5.0, a strength where they can now be felt and cause damage. And as the state continues fracking this will not stop. Right now they are still in the slight denial/make it go away stage. Oil companies are being forced to stop injecting waste water near towns that are experiencing earth quakes. It will be interesting to see how far this continues and just how strong these man made quakes can become. This is all uncharted territory to geologists. Never before has human kind been able to create earth quakes. And we are now creating thousands with no sign of stopping.
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