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Oklahoma Hit By Its Strongest-Ever Recorded Quake
First time accepted submitter Wheelie_boy writes "No word yet on hell freezing over, but Oklahoma experienced a 5.6 magnitude earthquake early Sunday morning. This is the largest quake ever recorded in the state. Only minor damage and no casualties have been reported."
To be fair, it does use the possessive "its" to specify that it's Oklahoma's strongest earthquake, but still probably not especially newsworthy on a tech site.
I'm in OK for business, and the quake got me out of bed last night.
I grabbed clothes and rushed downstairs ready to get out of the building, if needed, but when I got down there no one else was panicking or anything, so I supposed I was the only one who over-reacted. It was about 11pm.
It was pretty intense - I lived near San Diego for six years, and felt plenty of tremors, but the quake last night was the scariest I've felt. Possibly because I wasn't on the ground floor of the hotel.
Other than that, it wasn't a big deal. No one was streaming from the hotel and there weren't throngs of people screaming. There were lots of people calling the front desk asking if there had been an accident (no one could believe that it was a quake).
Interestingly, there was another quake the night before as well, a 4.2 (the guy at the front desk told me). That one didn't even wake me up though.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
Are you kidding? Your house is clearly under some sort of magic spell that prevents it from being destroyed!!
This is a good reminder that earthquakes do eventually occur in many places that we like to think of as earthquake-proof, even if they're rare.
Having recently moved to the Chicago area from California, I find myself having to learn to live with the vague feeling of unease that's caused by the fact that the most popular building style here seems to be "big pile of bricks".
If an earthquake of substantial size ever does hit you in an area where they are rare enough that there's no pressure to make building codes stronger, then chances are your odds of dying will be a lot greater than if you lived in California where the new buildings are all very safe and the old buildings have at least been tested a few times.
So while living in the mid-west etc. greatly reduces your chance of experiencing a large earthquake, the reduction in risk for actually dying in an earthquake is probably not as large as people like to think.
G.
Are there sure it wasn't a stampede? Because I was under the assumption that only two things come from Oklahoma, and earthquakes aren't one of them.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
But at least we know the industry apologists are on faster.
I'd wait until after the locusts and frogs.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
You build to suit the prevailing conditions. Here on the west coast of Scotland, we don't build to withstand earthquakes but we do build to withstand regular 140mph winds.
It's an earthquake. Geology nerds like that kind of stuff.
I'm sure the editors are sorry that you wasted your valuable time reading an article written for a different kind of nerd.
Because we don't get earthquakes in this part of the world. Ever. There was an earthquake just SE of San Antonio, Texas - the second ever recorded, and about 5 miles from an active fracking operation. Fracking is a really screwy operation that a lot of countries have banned because it causes a lot of problems and earthquakes.
moox. for a new generation.
It could be fracking or the storage of fracking fluids or it could just be basic earth geology. But it is hard to do a cause and effect on earthquakes. Only time will time if more, larger quakes become frequent and can be triangulated back to large operating drilling rigs.
Arkansas isn't waiting to find out. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/07/27/arkansas-commission-votes-to-ban-wells/
Come now, nerds. All this talk and no science. How about something from the Oklahoma Geological Survey? They set out to disprove an earlier quake this year was the result of fracking. Instead, they found correlation:
http://www.eenews.net/assets/2011/11/02/document_pm_01.pdf
Here is some commentary on the report:
http://www.eenews.net/public/eenewspm/2011/11/02/1
http://www.springerlink.com/content/u315626k2071q0j0/
Some experimental geothermal projects in Switzerland & Australia were aborted because people panicked about the possible relationship to small quakes in the area of the hydraulic fracturing.
Really a pity, IMO, a few smallish (Mw 4) quakes are a low price to pay for virtually unlimited and potentially very clean energy.
My dad worked in the industry for years and years through KS, OK and TX. He went on many many frack jobs that, in my memory, go back to at least the mid '70's. Please do not link an earthquake today to an active frack job just next door. Or in the case of the San Antonio "second ever recorded" to the active project. I know it is easy to link the two in your mind but these jobs have been happening for decades without an increase of seismic activity so just realize sometimes it can just be circumstantial connection.
Fracking is a really screwy operation that a lot of countries have banned because it causes a lot of problems and earthquakes.
Please compare the relative depths of fracking operations and the faults upon which earthquakes occur.
And I'd be pretty surprised if the New Madrid quake didn't rattle Oklahoma since it rang church bells in Boston.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Here's the official info on the quake from the USGS: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/usb0006klz.php
I'm in Norman, OK, and there was definitely some pretty good shaking here, although not enough to cause any real damage (it knocked a stack of dvd cases off of my dresser... not sure if that counts as "damage"). In the small towns closer to the epicenter there was certainly some damage, however. At least one highway was buckled in a spot, and there were apparently multiple instances of chimneys collapsing and falling through people's roofs, so some luck was involved in no one getting seriously hurt. Not California level earthquake damage, sure, but perhaps more than just "minor", at least by OK earthquake standards.
There was also a 4.7 quake centered near the same spot around 2:15 local time yesterday morning. The area where the quakes occurred has occasionally been having small tremors for well over a year now, although the last one before yesterday that was strong enough for everyone in Norman to feel was last October (in 2010).
Because 5.6 is the largest ever recorded in the state, perhaps? Just because it's normal or boring to someone in another part of the world doesn't discount this as news. If 1/3 of the population of Europe were on the brink of starvation, would it be normal and un-newsworthy simply because there are countries in Africa where that (or worse) is normal?
Using your logic, it can be argued that nothing is newsworthy here, simply because in all probability, everything interesting has already happened on a larger scale somewhere else in the universe.
Wrong. OK has a history of M5+ quakes about avery 60 years. 1887, 1952 and now 2011.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Not according to the USGS seismic hazard maps. Unlike most other states, Oklahoma even has a separate map dedicated to that state. See:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/hazards/products/conterminous/2008/maps/
There are many states that are prone to periodic earthquakes. This includes many states that most people just assume do not have earthquakes because they are infrequent. I would be hesitant to assume attribution to a fracking that which can be adequately explained by previously known geological science.
http://www.okgeosurvey1.gov/pages/home.php
That area of Oklahoma is not a big natural gas location or oil producing area that I know of. The quake was approximately 30 miles from Cushing, Oklahoma. The "Pipeline Crossroads of the world", a major hub in pipelines that connect the gulf coast to the interior. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cushing,_Oklahoma No reported damage that I know of there.
It was extremely amazing for someone who's never felt an earthquake like that. A slow rumbling to start, felt like a big truck passing outside, then building up, and starting to shake the house more, then significant vibrations going on for some time. Very different from the last big earthquake that hit closer to Oklahoma City last Oct 2010. That one had a short sharp type vibration that didnt last very long at all. http://newsok.com/oklahoma-earthquake-small-to-moderate-quake-rattles-nerves/article/3504094
It wasn't until it was over that I gave any thought to trying to get out of the house or anything.
Come now, nerds. All this talk and no science. How about something from the Oklahoma Geological Survey? They set out to disprove an earlier quake this year was the result of fracking. Instead, they found correlation: http://www.eenews.net/assets/2011/11/02/document_pm_01.pdf
Here is some commentary on the report: http://www.eenews.net/public/eenewspm/2011/11/02/1
I'm glad you posted this.. but did you read it?
For all of those talking about hydrofracking / drilling / wastewater disposal wells in the same sentence, as if they are the same thing.. they are three completely different processes. First you drill a well. Then the drill rig leaves, and there is a well casing going to the formation. Hydrofracturing equipment moves in and swarms over the wellsite.. but this does not involve a tall drilling rig, as there is no drilling going on. High pressure water and sand are pumped downhole until the well is sufficiently fractured. Then the fracturing equipment leaves. The well makes oil, gas and water. Not always oil.. but usually. The water is useless, so it's trucked off. If there is a whole lot of water, then trucking is expensive, so they drill a wastewater disposal well which pumps the water into a different formation. Sometimes this is on a fault line, and sometimes it lubricates the fault so that earthquakes start happening.
But notice.. the wastewater disposal well is both not on the same site nor in the same formation as the hydrofractured well. If hydrofracturing has any effect at all, it must be due to fracturing on a fault line where there isn't already a lot of fluid accumulated.
I seriously thought the roof was about to come down.. I live in east Edmond, about 30 miles from the strike point. I've lived in OK for most of my life, and we haven't had earthquakes until the last couple years. I've been through several 4+ magnitude quakes the last 2 years, and I can't help but think this correlates pretty well to the recent ramp up of fracking in OK.
fracking has nothing to do with global warming, melting ice caps, "climate change", or anything else. It something people do to extract natural gas, and is independent of the amount of methane, CO2, or water vapor in the atmosphere.
Similarly, earthquakes also have absolutely nothing to do with AGW, melting ice caps, "climate change" or anything else. They are a function of built-up tension between neighboring tectonic plates.
Finally, when you consider the amount of energy that it takes to shift that much earth, you realize that it is ridiculous to think that fracking could cause earthquakes-- unless you mean that the fracking somehow "released" the pent-up energy between plates, and caused an earlier, lower-magnitude earthquake than otherwise would have occurred. But the earthquake would have happened whether or not fracking took place.