effin earthquakes

[ram57ta]

Felt it in Grand Prairie. First one I've experienced. Interesting.

[jluv]

Didn't feel shit in South Arlington. Never do, though.

[Captain Crawfish]

Mostly due to the drilling and fracing over the last few years creating new micro fault lines

got proof?

[Armedtrigger01]

Felt it in euless

[Trip McNeely]

Mostly due to the drilling and fracing over the last few years creating new micro fault lines

lol. If it is drilling related it's not due to frac'ing, its the salt water injection wells that are causing them. I assure you. This state has more frac'ing going on than any other state and not a 1 earthquake ever. There's also no injection wells as they are outlawed here.

[bcoop]

Drilling may possibly have something to do with it, but there is a fault line that runs under Northgate and through Cottonwood Valley. There have been earthquakes in Irving for as long as I can remember. There are always very small, but they've been going on for a long time.

[black50]

lol. If it is drilling related it's not due to frac'ing, its the salt water injection wells that are causing them. I assure you. This state has more frac'ing going on than any other state and not a 1 earthquake ever. There's also no injection wells as they are outlawed here.

I read that the drilling is not really to blame (kinda of)...What has happened is the water/brine/oil that is being injected by the injection wells is basically lubing up the old fault lines that were already there and letting them move...im no expert on this but that sounds like a decent theory...

[Jaredther6er]

We felt it in Wylie

[Treasure Chest]

Mostly due to the drilling and fracing over the last few years creating new micro fault lines

The Balcones fault zone has always been active. It's just considered low risk. My grandpa used to talk about the earthquakes in Texas when he was a kid. Apparently, there have been some doozies. There were also quite a few in the 50's and 60's, from what he said.

[Shaggin Wagon]

Well, I guess I better apologize to the wife for blaming her last night.

[talisman]

DALLAS (AP) — A small earthquake followed by an aftershock rattled a suburb west of Dallas overnight, cracking some walls and knocking down pictures, but authorities reported no serious damage and the unscathed Dallas-Fort Worth airport near the epicenter kept up normal flight operations.
Emergency officials said they had no indications of any injuries from Saturday's late-night quake.

The initial earthquake measuring a preliminary magnitude of 3.4 struck at 11:05 p.m. CDT on Saturday and was centered about 2 miles north of the Dallas suburb of Irving, the US Geological Survey's national earthquake monitoring center in Golden, Colo., reported. USGS Geophysicist Randy Baldwin told The Associated Press from Colorado that the initial quake lasted several seconds and appeared strong enough to be felt up to 15 or 20 miles away.

He said the smaller aftershock with an estimated 3.1 magnitude occurred four minutes later and just a few miles away in another area west of Dallas.
Irving's emergency operators were flooded with more than 400 calls after the initial quake as people reported such minor damage as cracks in some walls and a ceiling, pictures knocked down and a report of a possible gas leak, according to an emergency official, Pat McMacken. City officials said they were still following up on the various reports early Sunday.

The Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport continued routine operations even though the shaking was felt at the airport partly located in Irving's city limits, airport public affairs officer David Magana said. He told AP that the airport, which bustles at peak hours because of 1,800 daily departures and arrivals, was in a quiet period with very little air traffic late Saturday night.

He said the shaking caught the attention of those at the airport but didn't prompt any wider alarm.

"I wouldn't call it panic. I would call it surprise," Magana said by phone.
He said members of the airport operations team went out afterward and inspected landing strips, buildings and other airport installations and found no damage.

"There were no impacts or outages and no disruptions to flights," Magana said. "I felt it at my house. It shook it a little bit but it wasn't enough of a jolt to shake anything loose like you have in California. I've been in California and this was nothing like that."

Some reports in Dallas said the rattling was felt for many blocks all around Irving, beginning lightly and ending with a jolt. One person reported the quake was strong enough to knock open some file cabinets. Others reported that lightbulbs shattered during the quake.

Baldwin said more aftershocks are possible Sunday, noting the region has been periodically rattled by small quakes including a swarm of minor temblors in 2008. He also said magnitude estimates of the quake and aftershock could be revised after further study because the seismological station is rather distant at about 65 miles from the epicenters of the quake and aftershock.

About 1,200 reports by people who felt the quake were recorded with the Colorado earthquake monitoring center soon after it hit.

[ARIX]

We were in the middle of a live broadcast when the whole damn building started shaking. Our anchor mentioned something hit the building but the show went on. I thought it was an explosion or a semi-truck. One thing is for sure, the buildings in Texas won't take much to topple.

[talisman]

got proof?

Three unusual earthquakes that shook a suburb west of Dallas over the weekend appear to be connected to the past disposal of wastewater from local hydraulic fracturing operations, a geophysicist who has studied earthquakes in the region says.

Preliminary data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) show the first quake, a magnitude 3.4, hit at 11:05 p.m. CDT on Saturday a few miles southeast of the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) International Airport. It was followed 4 minutes later by a 3.1-magnitude aftershock that originated nearby.

A third, magnitude-2.1 quake trailed Saturday's rumbles by just under 24 hours, touching off at 10:41 p.m. CDT on Sunday from an epicenter a couple miles east of the first, according to the USGS. The tremors set off a volley of 911 calls, according to Reuters, but no injuries have been reported.
Not a coincidence

Before a series of small quakes on Halloween 2008, the Dallas area had never recorded a magnitude-3 earthquake, said Cliff Frohlich, associate director and senior research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics. USGS data show that, since then, it has felt at least one quake at or above a magnitude 3 every year except 2010.'

Frohlich said he doesn't think it's a coincidence that an intensification in seismic activity in the Dallas area came the year after a pocket of ground just south of (and thousands of feet below) the DFW airport began to be inundated with wastewater from hydraulic fracturing.

During hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," millions of gallons of high-pressure, chemical-laden water are pumped into an underground geologic formation (the Barnett Shale, in the case of northern Texas) to free up oil. But once fractures have been opened up in the rock and the water pressure is allowed to abate, internal pressure from the rock causes fracking fluids to rise back to the surface, becoming what the natural gas industry calls "flowback," according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

"That's dirty water you have to get rid of," said Frohlich. "One way people do that is to pump it back into the ground."

In a study he recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Frohlich analyzed 67 earthquakes recorded between November 2009 and September 2011 in a 43.5-mile (70 kilometers) grid covering northern Texas' Barnett Shale formation. He found that all 24 of the earthquakes with the most reliably located epicenters originated within 2 miles (3.2 km) of one or more injection wells for wastewater disposal.

The injection well just south of DFW airport has been out of use since September 2011, according to Frohlich, but he says that doesn't rule it out as a cause of the weekend's quakes. He explained that, though water is no longer being added, lingering pressure differences from wastewater injection could still be contributing to the lubrication of long-stuck faults.

"Faults are everywhere. A lot of them are stuck, but if you pump water in there, it reduces friction and the fault slips a little," Frohlich told Life's Little Mysteries. "I can't prove that that's what happened, but it's a plausible explanation."

Oliver Boyd, a USGS seismologist and an adjunct professor of geophysics at the University of Memphis, agrees that, in general, links between wastewater injection and seismic activity are plausible.

"Most, if not all, geophysicists expect induced earthquakes to be more likely from wastewater injection rather than hydrofracking," Boyd wrote in an email to Life's Little Mysteries. "This is because the wastewater injection tends to occur at greater depth where earthquakes are more likely to nucleate. I also agree [with Frohlich] that induced earthquakes are likely to persist for some time (months to years) after wastewater injection has ceased."

For past examples of likely human-induced earthquakes, Boyd points to the story of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a now-closed U.S. Army chemical weapons manufacturing center that operated just outside of Denver until the early '90s.

In 1961, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal drilled a 12,000-foot-deep (3,658 meters) waste fluid disposal well near Denver. According to the USGS, "an unusual series of earthquakes erupted in the area soon after."

Use of the well was discontinued in February 1966. A year and a half later, on Aug. 9, 1967, a 5.3-magnitude earthquake, the most powerful in Denver's history, struck. It was followed by a 5.2-magnitude quake in the region that November, according to the USGS.

[VaderTT]

Photoshopped.

[ceyko]

lol. If it is drilling related it's not due to frac'ing, its the salt water injection wells that are causing them. I assure you. This state has more frac'ing going on than any other state and not a 1 earthquake ever. There's also no injection wells as they are outlawed here.

Not entirely true, there was one last year in the Allentown area (well, that was not the epicenter, that's the area my Dad was at.), he though someone was shaking his truck. (F-350)

Nothing serious. Interesting part is he has never noticed a quake in the area until that one and we were talking about it last night. Now that drilling and such has started...

...then we stopped cause we have no real education on that matter and it quite possibly could be coincidence.