Frack this

[CG6468]

Fracking could have caused East Coast earthquake
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Published: 24 August, 2011, 20:36

Experts are looking for a reason behind Tuesday afternoon’s unlikely 5.8 magnitude earthquake that shook people up and down the East Coast, and some are saying that a recent rise in fracking could be the culprit.

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is the man-made splintering of underground rocks to expedite the exploiting of natural resources. It’s become a widespread phenomenon since its introduction in 2004, and though the practice can help increase supplies of oil and gas without reaching out internationally for imports, the result it can have on the geological make-up of the Earth can be ravaging. Now some experts say the rise in fracking could be to blame for yesterday’s quake.

The odds of a quake exceeding a magnitude of 5.5 occurring in central Virginia are so slim that Dominion Power determined only around six quakes of that size would occur in the area over the next 10,000 years. Dominion was looking at building a third nuclear reactor at their power plant in North Anna, VA, where facilities had to be taken offline yesterday as a result of the quake. Despite predicting that the site would be scarcely affected ever by a tremor, the quake’s epicenter was only mere miles from the nuclear facility.

Yup. Gotta blame someone for a natural occurring event.

Well, I'll Be Fracked!

[Wineslob]

I am a geologist in the mid-Atlantic region with some familiarity of the fracking process and a lot of familiarity with the regional geology of Virginia. The assertion that fracking could be even partly responsible for the Tuesday earthquake is completely unsupported.

What is glibly dismissed as "only 90 miles" in this article is in fact a tremendous distance over which to claim causality for the relatively small explosions that do fracking. It's like setting off firecrackers on the north side of Manhattan, and then saying that they brought down the World Trade Center: the distance and magnitudes involved are implausibly large.

Nope, no agenda in the "article".