The shaking started just after 9 a.m., rumbling through the wilderness about 130 kilometres northwest of Fort St. John, B.C.
As the days passed, Kao started receiving numbers from other seismograph networks run by the BC Oil and Gas Commission, several universities, and Petronas, which had its own instruments on site. But Kao says there remain big open questions, and some scientists are still asking themselves, could humans trigger a major earthquake in B.C.?
The most powerful human-triggered earthquake is thought to be the 2008 Great Sichuan earthquake in China, which at magnitude 7.9, killed nearly 90,000 people. Scientists believe the earthquake's origins go back to 2015, when the Zipingpu Reservoir impounded 320 million tonnes of water. The water’s weight is thought to have pushed down on the Longmen Shan fault line, hastening the earthquake’s arrival by up to hundreds of years. In Switzerland, a magnitude 3.
But the footprint of such extraction processes is not just felt through the planet’s shifting climate. Underground, the injected fluid raises the pressure in the cracks, fissures and the pores between sand and rock. Over years of extraction, that pressure can build across kilometres of underground formations, eventually coming into contact and lubricating a seismic fault.
In a follow-up study, his team found the fluids had reached a preexisting fault, setting off the earthquake. But the science is complicated and changes with local geology. How risky are fracked earthquakes? The complicated links between earthquakes and fracking come down to local geology and how much fracking occurs over time.
Things get complicated at the spaces in between, places like Fort St. John and the rest of northeastern B.C., major centres for fracking operations that sit on the edge of B.C.'s mountainous terrain, a place with some natural seismic risk. That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a large earthquake set off by human activity in the future. According to the Gutenberg-Richter law of seismology, the more small earthquakes there are over time, the more likely big ones will occur at some point down the road.
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