Opinion:
LMG
I live right in that area with all the quakes. I think I've felt 3 of them. Our Corporation Commission shut down a big saltwater disposal site, but the quakes continue. The biggest quake I have felt here, which actually cracked the walls around doorways and caused objects to fall was a 4.1 in the early 90's, long before fracking was going on. Oklahoma has several fault lines, including the Nemaha. I'm just not convinced that fracking plays a dominant role in these quakes. The New Madrid is overdue, and if things are shifting there, that could be causing movement on nearby faults.
Small earthquakes shaking Oklahoma and southern Kansas daily and linked to energy drilling are dramatically increasing the chance of bigger and dangerous quakes, federal research indicates.
This once stable region is now just as likely to see serious damaging and potentially harmful earthquakes as the highest risk places east of the Rockies such as New Madrid, Missouri, and Charleston, South Carolina, which had major quakes in the past two centuries.
Still it's a low risk, about a 1 in 2,500 years' chance of happening, according to geophysicist William Ellsworth of the U.S. Geological Survey.
"To some degree we've dodged a bullet in Oklahoma," Ellsworth said after a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
