A 2.7-magnitude earthquake shook Irving at about 6 a.m. this morning. These minor events, none of which have caused significant damage or injuries, have been so common in the area (it’s the 12th since the beginning of October) that I’ve begun to feel downright Californian in my lack of excitement in hearing news of another.
The Morning News has a map showing the close proximity of the epicenters of each of these quakes to a natural gas well. Fracking, and more specifically the injection of wastewater from fracking being injected into the ground, has been found in some studies to be correlated with greater seismic activity.
A FrontBurnervian in the oil and gas business sent me a note with a map from a drilling industry information site showing the horizontal track of the well’s drilling bores was in the opposite direction from where the quakes are clustered. He argued that because of this, and because the well hasn’t been active since 2012, it’s likely not responsible for the tremors.
I ran this claim by Brian Stump, a seismologist at SMU, and he said what makes this difficult to verify is the lack of precision in the United States Geological Survey data. It’s the USGS that monitors seismic activity across the country. Says Stump:
The locations of the events that have been reported are based on USGS regional analysis. The USGS has responsibility for reporting on seismicity in the US. Historically their locations have sometimes had a bias or error in the locations since they rely on seismic stations that can be some distance from the earthquakes. Typically in our studies of historic events at DFW airport, Cleburne and Azle the deployment of portable instrumentation has provided improved locations that can be used in assessing the details of the earthquakes. That being said, I believe that experience is improving the USGS locations but cannot speak to the issue your reader raises at this time.
So when you look at a cluster of earthquake locations on a map, know that the epicenters may not be exactly where the USGS says they are. In this case, the quakes might actually (based on what Stump said) have originated on the other side of the gas well, in the direction of the drilling bores the FrontBurnervian pointed us to, which could imply a connection.
Or maybe it really is just God’s wrath at work. Or Jerry Jones’.
