re: 4.7 Magnitude Earthquake Hits Oklahoma

The fracking itself isn't necessarily causing earthquakes. The fluids that are used in fracking (mainly the SW waste that comes back up the well) is injected into disposal wells thousands of feet deep encased in concrete (cheap and relatively safe).

quote:

---

“The model I use is called the air hockey table model,” says Cliff Frohlich, a research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, Austin. “Suppose you tilt an air hockey table. If there’s no air on, the puck just sits there. Gravity wants it to move but it doesn’t move because of friction [with the table surface]. But if you turn the air on, the puck slips. Faults are the same. If you pump water in a fault, the fault can slip, causing an earthquake."

---