Scientists have documented for the first time in Canadian fracker fields earthquakes caused by oil and gas drilling.
A team of researchers from the Geological Survey of Canada documented a new type of earthquake event. It helps to explain how earthquakes can be triggered by near-imperceptible tremors.
The study found that around 10 percent of the earthquakes recorded over 5 months were less violent than usual.
"We assumed that fracking earthquakes behave like most other earthquakes and have roughly the same rupture speed of two to three kilometers per second," explains seismologist Rebecca Harrington of Ruhr-Universitt Bochum, Germany.
The oil and gas industry uses a process known as "hydraulic fracturing" to break up rocks in a drilled well.
By its very design, frack causes small earthquakes that can be detected to extract oil and gas. The process can stress existing geological fault lines by pumping huge amounts of wastewater underground.
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The new type of'slow-slip' signals documented, dubbed hybrid-frequency waveform earthquakes for their distinctive features, release little seismic energy and measured magnitude 2.0 or less.
It's thought that high-pressure fracturing causes aseismic slips which interact with nearby faults, stress rocks and lead to larger seismic events, with the hybrid-frequency waveforms being new evidence of that transition happening.
The study was published with funding from an open science initiative, and follows mounting concerns that the practice of frack is generating larger and larger earthquakes.
The largest earthquake caused by frackery struck China in the year of 2018, measuring 5.7 and the same magnitude as a naturally occurring earthquake in Pakistan that left at least 20 people dead. These earthquakes have the potential to cause serious harm.
Studies have shown that fluid injection can cause earthquakes much faster and farther away than previously thought.
This kind of research, which seeks to understand how fracking causes small earthquakes, provides critical evidence linking the practice to earthquakes, which is important for residents living near the sites who have opposed the practice.
In the absence of a known mechanism for causing earthquakes more than a mile or two from drilling sites, operators have often denied responsibility.
There has been a dramatic increase in seismic activity in the midwestern United States in the past few decades, which has spurred much of this research.
A study done in 2013 showed that oil and gas fields are prone to mid-sized earthquakes triggered by other large earthquakes thousands of kilometers away, with epicenters under other continents.
While some seismologists argue that a better understanding of earthquakes caused by frack helps to manage and mitigate associated risks, the question on many people's minds is whether frack should be happening at all, given the trajectory our planet is on.
The research on earthquakes triggered by fda has some serious ramifications for carbon capture and storage technologies, which are not yet proven at scale and similarly involve injecting captured carbon deep below ground.
"An earthquake-caused collapse of an artificial carbon dioxide reservoir would cause a lot of costs to be wasted, as well as posing health risks to local residents, so understanding how to manage such risks is important in the development of such technology," Foulger wrote.
Nature Communications published the study.
