Fracking's Enhanced Oil and Gas Recovery Means More Earthquakes

摘要

Earthquakes, traffic deaths, worker deaths and injuries, low birth weights, increased overall mortality, benzene, methane emissions, drinking water contamination, prostitution, organized crime, and let's not forget gonorrhea; this list reads like the scene sequences of a B horror movie. Yet all these, and more, have been linked, albeit sometimes far from conclusively, to fracking. Even if there remains some residual uncertainty as to whether fracking narrowly defined causes earthquakes, enhanced methods of oil and gas production most certainly do. Ground zero, so to speak, is Oklahoma. The numbers are startling.