Ninety-nine percent of the time
the earth is basically still and we get very accustomed to that.
A powerful earthquake rattled Central Oklahoma Saturday...
A magnitude 5.6 earthquake northeast of Oklahoma City...
This is surveillance video from inside the store. It captured glass shattering on the ground...
I grew up in Minnesota.
We'd take trips out west and we saw the mountains and the folded rocks.
It was fascinating to me that rocks could fold and bend and form mountains and move because the earth really
does seem pretty still for most people for the most part.
I realized I liked math a lot and I liked to be outside so I went for geophysics
because I could combine basically being outside and doing math.
I loved it because I actually feel like it's a puzzle we can never fully solve.
There's so much about the earth that we don't understand
and it has impact from water resources to
hazards to, you know, energy, oil and gas resources.
The practical aspects are there but it's also just
this challenge that I can stick with my whole life and it doesn't get boring.
Earthquakes, if you've been in them, it can be a really dramatic jolt.
You know, sometimes it can be just sort of some wavy kind of movement but at other times
it's really intense, really fast and shocking.
And there it is on the map, the magnitude 6.0 quake hitting just north of San Francisco...
...and look at this surveillance video, cameras rolling...
Usually we think of earthquakes in California or Alaska.
There started to be earthquakes where historically there hadn't been.
This morning's earthquake was centered right around Cherokee, Oklahoma. It was a 4.7 in magnitude...
And so it was a puzzle as to why this was happening.
I was in Oklahoma at the time and I was
oddly or fortuitously well-placed to be able to
understand the earthquakes.
The earthquakes geographically spread through time
until it encompassed the suburbs of Oklahoma City.
That potentially brought it home that this is real, this is serious, it's not going away.
Let's look at the science, let's decide what we're going to do.
Earthquakes rattling Oklahoma over the past few days.
The geological survey says about 700 strong
earthquakes have hit Oklahoma so far this year.
That's way up from just 20 in 2009.
My expertise in general is high resolution imaging of faults and seismicity.
There weren't many people in the area that had the background necessary to understand the problem.
The very first step was to record the earthquakes better
and so we put out stations, went out into the field
and then we started to get all the data that we could on wells.
Where the water was going in, what rates and tied that all together with physical models of how that fluid would
move through the subsurface to see if you would be raising pressure at the earthquake locations from these wells.
Cornell University seismologist Katie Keranen was teaching in Oklahoma
when the increase in quakes began.
Keranen was among the first scientists to link the earthquakes to oil and gas production.
These are man-made earthquakes?
Most people feel that the majority of these are linked to this water being disposed.
Fracking and the injection are not actually one and the same.
Basically fracking is part of the production process and the water disposal that's causing the earthquakes
at least in Oklahoma for the most part is a byproduct of getting rid of what's happened from production.
So it's not actually the drilling but once you drill they were producing a lot of water.
Then you have to do something with the water and so they were injecting it back into some other part
of the subsurface and then when the pressure rises against the fault
you can basically trigger the fault to slip and that's an earthquake. That's where the earthquakes come from.
My approach was really just to keep it focused on do we understand physically what's happening,
what do we know, what don't we know, and what can we say with certainty to help the rest of the people
that were interested decide what to do after that.
Studies are linking the injection of wastewater for enhanced oil and gas exploration.
And so there was that process of years of many others doing research that corroborated the research
until now when, in Oklahoma, the governor has sort of acknowledged that these are induced
and the Corporation Commission which regulates the activity has begun to guide operations
and I think now the story has evolved to the point where it's, you know, well accepted.
Keranen and her student Catherine Lambert have set up equipment to detect extremely small quakes
hoping the small quakes might provide warnings of larger ones.
There's in my mind immense value to studying the earthquakes.
I think there's a chance of solving problems we've been working on for decades.
If we had an understanding of where big earthquakes happen
or even a few days or some number of hours of warning
we could prepare people and we would basically be able to mitigate some degree of the hazard.
It would be a, really a massive leap forward in safety.
And I think these data give us a chance to do that.
There's the economic impact of knowing where and when. But there's also the way to save people's lives.