90%of Earthquakes in Western Canada Triggered by Facking Operations
A new fracking danger emerges: earthquakes
A new study by the Geological Survey of Canada has revealed that fracking is to blame for up to 90 percent of the earthquakes that occur in western Canada, a deeply disturbing fact.
As if fracking wasn’t bad enough–tainting groundwater sources, causing tap water to ignite, driving people from their homes with noise and fumes, dumping diesel fuel and toxic wastewater in unlined ponds–now a new threat has emerged as a result of the controversial practice for extracting gas and oil: earthquakes.
“It is important for us to realize that indeed hydraulic fracturing can induce earthquakes,” said Honn Kao, a study co-author.
Since 1985, the study found, nearly every large earthquake that occurred in western Canada, British Columbia and Alberta oil patches can be traced to hydraulic fracturing.
It has long been suspected that fracking causes earthquakes, and studies have been conducted in Oklahoma pointing to the possibility. However, the study differed from other research carried out in the US. In those earlier studies, scientists mostly blamed the earthquakes on the injection of wastewater back into the ground after the recovery of oil and gas was complete. But the new findings in Canada suggests something different:
“There are more earthquakes in western Canada that are more related to hydraulic fracturing than wastewater injection by a factor of about two,” said study co-author David Eaton, a University of Calgary geophysicist.
The study doesn’t get into reasons why induced seismic activity might be linked to different processes in the central U.S. and western Canada. However, one possibility that the study’s authors floated was that some oil and gas fields in the U.S., especially Oklahoma, use much larger amounts of water in their operations, compared to Canadian fracking sites.
But the public seems to finally be catching on to what a huge environmental rip-off fracking really is. A recent Gallup poll found that the rate of opposition to fracking among US respondents has risen from 40 percent to 51 percent.
The question then becomes when will the politicians fall in line and follow where the people are leading?