We had another earthquake this morning at a little after 2:00am. There wasn’t much to it, rattled the house for a few seconds. Nothing was broken. But seriously! Two earthquakes in Oklahoma in my lifetime? The first one was sort of interesting; the second one has me thinking, if we can have little ones we could maybe have a big one someday.
I know every region has some kind of natural disaster that people have to worry about. Here we have tornadoes, hail, flash floods, drought, grass fires, extreme heat, extreme cold, and ice storms. Adding earthquakes to that list is just a bit much don’t you think?
UPDATE: We had another one Saturday night! Here’s a local news article about the quakes. To answer the question in the comments, a University of Tulsa geologist says that it was not caused by fracking. I do not know if this geologist has any connection with the oil industry but his explanation sounds plausible enough.
November 5th, 2011 - 10:46 pm
Inland portions of my home state of Connecticut are supposedly the safest parts of the United States in terms of being at low risk of natural disasters. I’m skeptical, however: the area has had some tornadoes (there was a bad one just over the line in Massachusetts not long ago), hurricanes could wreak some havoc that far inland, and just last week there was a freak snowstorm with massive power failures.
November 6th, 2011 - 1:20 pm
Do you have fracking (hydraulic fracturing of shale rock strata, in order to extract oil or gas) going on in Oklahoma?
It’s been linked to two earthquakes in north-western England.
November 7th, 2011 - 8:38 am
What I’m hoping this DOES NOT mean is that these are somehow connected to the big New Madrid fault, and it’s flexing for a big quake. That would be devastating and many lives would be lost in Memphis and St. Louis.
OTOH, if this means that tension on the New Madrid fault is being released without doing too much harm, then I’m ok with the earthquakes here.
November 7th, 2011 - 9:07 pm
We have lots of fracking action (fraction?) in the state, but most of it is taking place in the western half; the quakes are all coming from the east.
Any connection to New Madrid seems tenuous at best.
November 8th, 2011 - 11:47 am
We had an earthquake here in Virginia (and basically across the entire east) not too long ago, if you’ll recall. No fracking was involved. I rather think that the earth is going through some kind of thing that has nothing to do with the activities of the human fleas living on its surface.
November 8th, 2011 - 4:52 pm
I think that’s probably true. Sometimes I wonder if we humans just like to imagine that we are more powerful than we actually are.