Oklahoma Earthquake Theory Paper

The recent increase in injection induced seismicity is caused by a corresponding increase in wastewater disposal in the central United States. The earthquake rate increase in Oklahoma, where the vast majority of the increase has occurred (585 of 688 M ≥3 earthquakes in the central United States in 2014), corresponds to a doubling of the wastewater disposal rate in the state from 1999 to 2013 (Shultz 2014). Near the town of Prague, Oklahoma, the biggest earthquake ever recorded in Oklahoma occurred having a magnitude of 5.6 and many seismologists believe that it was caused by fracking through disposal wells. The theory behind the earthquakes propose that the sheer volume of fluid that is injected into the ground is directly proportional to the magnitude of the quake. Figure 2 …show more content…
The Arbuckle Group is a volume of stratigraphic rock that can be aged and identified and is used for SWD in central Oklahoma. If injection is directly into the relatively high permeability lower Arbuckle Group in northern Oklahoma, pressure changes would be expected to spread out more quickly from the injection wells (Walsh and Zoback 2015). This observation provides some sort of explanation as to why the rise in seismic activity around the Cherokee and Perry study areas and the increase in injection rates are so jointly associated.Oklahoma’s landscape comprises of active fault zones that may generate an earthquake every couple centuries and until now the general consensus was that the fracking activities were directly causing the earthquakes. It was found that by increasing the fluid pressure through disposal of wastewater into the Arbuckle formation in the three areas of concentrated seismicity-from about 20 million barrels per year in 1997 to about 400 million barrels per year in 2013-2015 humans have sped up this process dramatically (Walsh and Zoback