Posted on 11/30/2015 6:36:45 AM PST by John W
MEDFORD, Oklahoma -
The U.S. Geological Survey says a 4.7 magnitude earthquake struck northern Oklahoma early Monday. There are no immediate reports of damage, but the quake was felt throughout much of the state and into Kansas.
The USGS says the quake hit at 3:49 a.m. in extreme northern Oklahoma. The epicenter was 16 miles west-southwest of Medford, or about 80 miles south of Wichita, Kansas.
The earthquake was upgraded after initial reports that it was magnitude 4.5.
Other earthquakes have struck since that one. The first -- with a magnitude of 3.0 -- centered just outside the Oklahoma City metropolitan area at 5:50 a.m. Monday.
A 3.1 magnitude quake near Perry was recorded at 7 a.m.
(Excerpt) Read more at newson6.com ...
Must be fracking!!
Good thing President Baraq Hussein Ubama is fighting Global Climate Change and fracking so this type of thing can be claimed to be reduced in frequency.
There will be wars and rumors of wars.
There will be earthquakes in diverse places.........................
Ooooooooooooklahoma where the aftershocks come sweeping down the plains.....
I live next door in Kansas, and the Oklahoma earthquakes have already been characterized as fracking related in the local media.
Hopefully this isn’t the New Madrid fault and related faults becoming active...
Funny, I was up at that 3:50 a.m. getting ready for an early morning flight. Didn’t feel a thing. My sister called and was laughing about how much it had just shaken her house, just 7 miles west of here. We are both about 70 miles from the epicenter. We both have had careers as geologists.
God’s planet is an interesting place to be.
Oldplayer
I hope everyone is OK.
So why is NW and SE New Mexico so stable? They have been drilling and fracking there for seventy years.
Needed something to break up the road ice
Ditto Alberta.
Ice storms, tornadoes, flooding...now this. Oklahoma ain’t doing so fine, OK...
Democrats are WAY smarter than us Conservatives, just ask them, and they don't see any problems. Fracking is just another corporate evil, per the Party. You do not question the Party.
Idiots.
Obviously, drilling and fracking have been going on in OK for as long as any other place. Here’s a term for your search engine: “induced seismicity.” It should link you to several recent articles on the subject. The condensed version: it’s re-injection of produced/waste water into formations that have poorly understood geologic faults. The state corporation commission immediately restricts injection wells in the vicinity of earthquakes for amounts injected and at what pressures. Also, if the injection well is using deep formations that are close to basement rock, then they’ve been making those operators plug their operations back to more shallow formations.
The situation in north-central and northwest OK is unique because the production formation that has been drilled horizontally and hydraulically fractured is known to hold lots of salt water that comes up with the produced oil. These waste injection wells were the answer to that problem but then they caused problems of their own with the earthquakes. The areas you cite don’t have nearly the amount of produced water to dispose.
Depth roughly 5 km. Fairly shallow.
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