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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we turn to our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday on the show. Last Friday, as you all know, the northeast experienced a 4.8-magnitude earthquake—epicenter, New Jersey. While we were live with our special coverage, one question came up a few times that we weren't able to get an answer to, and that was, could the earthquake have been caused by fracking?
While Friday's earthquake was likely the result of a really old fault line moving, human activity like fracking or depleting water reservoirs too quickly can cause earthquakes. The US Geological Survey caused these induced earthquakes, and with climate change, they could continue to become more common. Joining us now to discuss the link between fracking and earthquakes is Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox writing about climate change and energy policy. Umair, thanks for coming on today. Thanks for doing this.
Umair Irfan: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Brian Lehrer: Just to be clear, last Friday's earthquake in the northeast was probably not caused by fracking or its after-effects, right?
Umair Irfan: That's right. This is very likely a natural earthquake, even though it's rare. The East Coast does have some seismic activity that we've seen in the past, and it is not completely unexpected that occasionally an earthquake will occur here.
Brian Lehrer: You're right. The gargantuan expansion of hydraulic fracturing across the United States has left an earthquake epidemic in its wake. Maybe we should do a quick one-minute refresher on what hydraulic fracturing is, and then we'll go on to how much of an earthquake epidemic we're seeing as a result.
Umair Irfan: Hydraulic fracturing is now the most common way we extract oil and gas in the United States. You may have seen that the US is now the largest oil producer in the world and the largest gas producer, and this is a big reason why. The way it works, though, is that in order to fracture the rock underground that contains the natural gas in the oil, you have to pump a lot of water into these shale formations under high pressure, sometimes with other chemicals as well, and then sand as well to hold the rock formations open. When you do that, it causes that rock to crack open to let the little bubbles of gas and oil come out, and then you can extract that and then use that as fuel or whatever.
The problem is that you're using a lot of water in the process. As you pump water underground, it not only has the chemicals that you put in, but it also picks up a lot of heavy metals and salt and other unpleasant things that occur naturally in nature underground as well, and then you have to dispose of that water. You can't simply dump it into a stream because it's very salty and it has a whole bunch of toxic chemicals in it, so you have to re-inject that water into a separate well.
It's this wastewater reinjection that ends up actually causing seismic activity that the US Geological Survey says that while fracturing itself causes a minuscule amount of earthquakes, the main thing that human-caused earthquakes are driven by is this wastewater reinjection. Putting water into a layer in the ground where water wasn't before, that causes the fault lines there to be lubricated and increasing pressure there just causes things to be perturbed and that leads to earthquakes that we feel at the surface.
Brian Lehrer: Fracking is controversial in the climate context for other reasons, right? Because of the extraction of oil and natural gas in and of itself contributing to climate change?
Umair Irfan: Right. One of the big concerns is that while natural gas generally burns cleaner than coal. As we've replaced coal in the United States with natural gas, we've seen our overall greenhouse gas emissions decline. The problem is that natural gas, the main component is a compound called methane.
Methane is an odorless and colorless gas, and it's about 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere so even small methane leaks, small amounts of methane that are escaping from fracking operations or from leaks in pipelines, that can offset any gains you would get in terms of replacing coal. That's why that calculation has been really controversial because not a lot of people are actually doing a good job of tracking methane leaks at all. Some scientists are saying it's a lot more. The industry is saying, actually, no, we're doing a good job, and we have our leaks in check. How that calculation shakes out really affects the climate benefit of switching to natural gas.
Brian Lehrer: Fracking is a climate issue, and as a side effect, it's left what you call this earthquake epidemic in its wake. Earthquake epidemic? Epidemic is a strong word.
Umair Irfan: Right. Well, we're talking about areas where we've seen some of the most fracking in the country. This is basically areas like Oklahoma and states like Texas. These places have had lots of fracking and consequently lots of wastewater reinjection. Historically, they're not very geologically active. These are places that aren't used to having very many earthquakes at all. In the years since the fracking boom has taken off, residents there have reported and scientists have detected hundreds of earthquakes basically compared to maybe a couple dozen minor quakes before. Now we're talking about hundreds in and around a lot of these fracking-prone regions.
They've correlated this very strongly with the fracking activity and a lot of the geological work that people are doing in that area, and so it's been very unnerving for residents. These tend to be fairly small earthquakes by comparison, but some of them have caused property damage. Of course, if you live in that area and you suddenly notice the ground shaking, it's going to be very unnerving, especially if you know that there is a direct activity that's causing it.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I wonder if anybody is in Oklahoma right now. We asked for calls from Florida earlier in the show and we got them. Maybe Oklahoma is going to be a little more obscure for this particular audience, but maybe if you're in Oklahoma and have any take on fracking, having caused earthquakes there or anybody anywhere where this might have happened, or anybody with a question on the relationship between fracking for natural gas and earthquakes, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, give us a call or give us a text message on this for Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox writing about climate change and energy policy.
Just to add some more numbers to what you were saying a minute ago, in Oklahoma, the US Geological Survey reports that the number of earthquakes surged to 4,000 in 2015 and of those, 21 were greater than magnitude 4.0 and three were greater than magnitude 5.0. Whoa. How does that compare with what Oklahoma experienced before all the fracking?
Umair Irfan: Well, basically they were finding very few earthquakes. It's a very similar pattern in Texas as well. Basically, you would have maybe a couple dozen detectable earthquakes in the magnitude 1 to 2 range, and oftentimes it's because of the earthquakes that were felt from much further away. The epicenter may have actually been very, very far outside of the state, and then some of those ground vibrations were felt in Oklahoma and Texas.
Now we're seeing quakes with epicenters within Texas and Oklahoma, close to these fracking sites. One critical piece of evidence they found that this is associated with human activity is that when they've started to limit wastewater reinjection and limit the places where that can be done, they've seen the earthquake activity go down. That's why scientists say there's a very compelling link, and it actually a cause and effect between this wastewater reinjection associated with fracking and seismic activity in this region.
Brian Lehrer: Guess what? We have a call from Oklahoma. Let's see if that caller is ready to go on. We're going to take that caller second, and we'll go first to Alan, a little closer to home, Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hi, Alan.
Alan: Good morning, Brian. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, one of the other connections here to climate and earthquakes is the loss of arctic ice. The mass of that ice has been reported by scientists to have been reducing at such a rapid speed that the tectonic plates that had been pressed down over millennia by that historic mass now lifts up under the pressure of magma and allows movement relative to other tectonic plates in the Pacific and the Atlantic that cause a greater incidence of earthquake activity.
It's hard to identify any particular earthquake as specifically caused by that loss of ice mass, but I'm sure statistically they can show that there is a correlation between the rate of loss of ice mass in the Arctic and a gradual increase in earthquake activity in the vicinity.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Umair, anything on that?
Umair Irfan: Yes. That's a great point. When we're talking about arctic ice, we have to also be a little bit careful. We're not talking about sea ice, we're talking about ice that's on land, on ice shelves, and so that's places like Greenland where the ice is sitting on a landmass, and in Antarctica where also the ice is sitting on a landmass. The caller is right, that essentially what we see is that as ice melts, water is very, very heavy and it does a lot to press the ground. Then as that massive ice decreases, the ground does begin to rebound and we see some seismic effects. This tends to be a very slow-moving effect on geological timescales, but because humans are causing an increased amount of melting ice in many of these places where we do have ice sheets, that's where we're starting to see some seismic effects starting to materialize. There was actually an interesting study that came out earlier this year looking at subsidence along the East Coast.
Basically, that land is sinking along much of the region between New York and Virginia. Part of that is due to the fact that much of the North American landmass used to be covered with ice. If you think about a beanbag chair, if you sit on one side of the beanbag, the rest of the beanbag rises up, and then once you get up, it all sinks back down. That's the thing that actually happened here and that's going on right now. That as that ice sheet retreated, we started seeing land paradoxically moving down a little bit along the East Coast on the other side of that ice ridge.
That's causing things like relatively higher levels of sea level rise that are associated with that. That's also causing things like increased amounts of flooding and so on. That's something that's a very slow moving phenomenon, but, yes, over time as we see more loss of ice that was originally on land, we expect to see some degree of the ground responding, and that can cause tremors that we can feel.
Brian Lehrer: Here is Steve in Bandon, Oklahoma. Steve, you're on WNYC. Hi from New York.
Steve: Yes, thank you so much for having me.
Brian Lehrer: Are you a former New Yorker by the way, or how do you know the show?
Steve: Yes, yes. I used to live out in New Jersey and love the show. Love listening. Great information and big fan.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Where is Bandon, by the way? Not a place in Oklahoma that a lot of people around here have heard of.
Steve: Small town. Yes, it is suburb. About an hour, hour and a half southwest of Tulsa.
Brian Lehrer: Cool. What you got?
Steve: Well, I just wanted to talk about the seismic activity that we've had over the past couple years. It's been a huge issue. Myself and a lot of my neighbors have been really bothered by it.
Brian Lehrer: Did you have any ill effects from it, any damage? We saw a 4.8 cause basically no damage here in this area last week. Are you getting any kind of damage or injuries from these earthquakes that may be fracking related?
Steve: Well, there's been some damage, definitely some violence. A lot of us are thinking that a lot of seismic activity is the result of the 10 million immigrants that are marching across the southern border and--
Brian Lehrer: All right, Steve. All right, we're going to leave it there. Honestly, after that, I don't know if the whole call was a prank or who knows what. Let me ask you, Umair, the question that I was asking him which is, has there been any damage or any injuries from these fracking-related earthquakes?
Umair Irfan: There have definitely been residents in Texas and Oklahoma that have seen property damage as a result of these earthquakes. As mentioned, they tend to be fairly small, and while buildings do shake and maybe somethings fall off of shelves, that tends to be fairly minor. The other knock-on effect is though, that can start to affect property values. If you're a homeowner in that area and suddenly your home is in an area that starts to have earthquakes, one, you may need to be investing more to retrofit your home to be more resilient to ground movements, and another, it might just make it harder to sell your house if you ever decide to move.
That may lower the resale value of your property. That's one of the other concerns here, is that while we may not necessarily be seeing windows cracking or walls collapsing, the financial costs of these earthquakes are also something that a lot of homeowners are starting to reckon with and grapple with.
Brian Lehrer: Another thing besides fracking that I want to touch on that can cause earthquakes and maybe tangentially climate-related, that I think you've written about, is that human activity might also increase the chance of an earthquake when water reservoirs are quickly depleted. Can you tell us more about where in the world that's happening?
Umair Irfan: Right. We've seen groundwater being very drastically extracted in lots of worlds, especially in areas where we've seen huge cities blossom and crop up. In Southeast Asia, for instance, that's an area that naturally has a lot of earthquakes, but has also seen a huge population boom in the past century. In places like in cities and capitals like Jakarta, Indonesia, for instance, they've been seeing long running subsidence issues, the city itself is sinking. We're also seeing some tremors there that seem to be associated with that over extraction.
Water, when it's underground, applies pressure to the ground around it. When you suck all that water out the ground, then can start to move or collapse a little bit in response, and as that happens, that can lead to shakes that we can feel. Parts of the East Coast as well, we've seen that lots of groundwater extraction has also contributed to subsidence, to land sinking. It's really hard to detect the earthquakes that do come from that, but it does seem to have an effect on the geology. It may be one of several factors that are contributing to earthquake risks. It's really hard to tease out exactly which earthquake was contributed to by what factor, but scientists do expect that when you start mucking around underground, that tends to have some consequences.
Brian Lehrer: We're in our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday on The Brian Lehrer Show for another few minutes with Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox writing about climate change and energy policy, and looking at the relationship between fracking and earthquakes after last week's earthquake put earthquakes on everybody's mind all of a sudden, even though, and again, to be clear, the earthquake in the northeast last Friday is not believed to have had anything to do with fracking for natural gas, but a whole bunch of other earthquakes elsewhere in the US are believed to have had.
I'm going to flip the script a little bit here, Umair, to ask if there could be earthquakes or seismic activity caused by climate change itself. We're talking about fracking in this context because fracking is believed to contribute to climate change. What about from the change in climate itself? As the earth warms, and we have all these other effects from the warming, does any of that contribute to any known or potential additional seismic activity?
Umair Irfan: Well, as we were discussing earlier, right now we haven't seen any signals in earthquake or geological activity that we can contribute to climate change, but, again, one of the plausible mechanisms is losing ice that's on land. That if we see these ice masses that are sitting on places like Greenland, and on parts of Antarctica, and in some mountaintop glaciers as well, the ground will start to rebound as the massive ice above them shrinks. As that happens, that could potentially jostle the ground enough to cause some small tremors. In general, scientists don't expect that to be a huge contributor to earthquakes, but definitely they do expect to see some kind of geological effect as a result.
Brian Lehrer: Here is Sophie in Manhattan calling in who says she's a geotechnical engineer? Sophie, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling.
Sophie: Hi. Great, great talk today. I just wanted to make a comment on one thing we haven't really touched on, which is groundwater depletion, which is very common in construction dewatering and things like that where you're pulling water out of the subsurface is really a big factor in terms of changing the strength of the soil and changing the stability. Also, I think we mentioned injection of water. That also, just like when you go into a pool, you're lighter, the same thing happens in the soil.
If you're injecting a bunch of water, that's changing the stability of the soil. I would unfortunately disagree that it has anything to do with any ice caps really. I don't think that's a big factor. I think more it's the local watering effect in which we have poor drainage in a city that's just getting discharged into the waterways, and is actually making an artificially raised water table rather than anything really coming down from north in terms of, but I think the water is the main reason why we're seeing some changes in stability, and I don't know about earthquake induced, but definitely some changes in the dynamics of the soil.
Brian Lehrer: Umair, anything you want to say or ask Sophie?
Umair Irfan: No, I think she's absolutely right, and I do agree that I think that any kind of direct climate change effect is likely to be minimal. Again, we haven't really seen a signal at all from ice sheets melting leading to seismic activity, it's just something that's plausible, maybe sometime in the future. Sophie's right that also that, yes, the way we manipulate water underground has a lot of immediate consequences.
We tend to think of water use as something that happens from rivers, lakes, and streams, but there's a tremendous amount of water underground that we put to use, and maybe because it's out of sight, we don't oftentimes take care of what the consequences are if you take too much water out, or in the case of fracking, when you start injecting so much water back down. Obviously, yes, that tends to be one of the approximate causes of things like land levels rising and falling, and then in the case of fracking and wastewater reinjection, it can in fact trigger earthquakes.
Brian Lehrer: Sophie, thanks for adding to the conversation. Really appreciate what you know.
Sophie: Thank you for having me. Great, great, great show. Thank you.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you very, very much. Well, we're almost out of time. As we go on to our next and final segment, which is going to be to invite listeners to call in with their experience of the eclipse yesterday, after all the buildup to what an experience it would be. We were having you on to talk about fracking and earthquakes because we had the earthquake last Friday.
It never occurred to me that the eclipse could also come into this climate segment, but I see you recently wrote up about how yesterday's eclipse could be a potential test for the power grid. You note that US solar power has more than doubled since the last eclipse in 2017. It's not that eclipses which are predictable thousands of years in advance are huge threat, clouds, you note, are worse. It's just the behind-the-scenes transactions of shifting power around, no major eclipse blackouts. Why did you raise it in this context?
Umair Irfan: As you noted, because we have much more variable and intermittent energy on the power grid, it takes a lot more behind the scenes to actually keep things balanced. We're expecting a lot more solar energy and wind energy to be coming on the grid in the future. This eclipse though, while we do see clouds and sunrise and sunset every day, it gives utilities and grid operators a chance to test how quickly they can respond. Basically, we see gigawatts of power dropping in a few minutes and then bouncing right back. Smoothing over sudden drops and jumps like that is a critical activity in order to make sure that we can keep the fans and the lights on.
Increasingly grid operators want to make sure that they can automate this. They want to be able to test ways to do this without human intervention on the supply side. Increasingly they're using tools like AI to help anticipate demand, how people will respond if power goes out, and then be able to meet that as well. This was like a really important test case for them to be able to try out all these techniques. For the most part, we saw a fairly stable grid throughout that, and looks like they passed that test. This would mean, I think, give them a lot more optimism and confidence in being able to integrate more renewable energy into the power grid into the future.
Brian Lehrer: So Interesting. Where were you for the eclipse? Did you have an experience?
Umair Irfan: Yes, I was in Butler University, outside of Indianapolis, and I watched it from the Holcomb Observatory there. It was totally worth the drive.
Brian Lehrer: That's a totality location there in Indiana, right?
Umair Irfan: Exactly. Yes. The entire sky turned black, and for a few minutes, I was able to look directly at the sun for the very first time in my life.
Brian Lehrer: As a science reporter, what did that feel like, or as a human being?
Umair Irfan: It's just really awe-inspiring. You see these texts, and you hear about ancient people being very unnerved and moved by these things, and you see it in real life, and you're like, "Yes, I get that." This is a really interesting way of seeing the cosmos and like all that just directly have an impact on you. Something happening thousands of miles away, millions of miles away, suddenly changing the temperature and causing the lights and the darkness to spread and then come right back. It makes you feel really connected to the universe in a way that you tend to overlook on a day-to-day basis.
Brian Lehrer: Yes. Nicely described. I guess the difference between yesterday and ancient times, is in ancient times when this would suddenly come upon everybody when they weren't expecting it, it would get dark in the middle of the day, and they would go, "What is going on?" Yesterday, we had all the media tell us, "This is going to start at 3:25 and 11 seconds, and totality will end at 3:25 and 47 seconds," [chuckles] and levels of precision like that, right?
Umair Irfan: Right. The place where I was at, they were calling out the moment of the shadow passing over. They were calling a sports game, and people were applauding and cheering as it was happening. It was a really festive event.
Brian Lehrer: Awe-inspiring nonetheless. Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox writing about climate change and energy policy, thank you so much for joining us today. Really, really appreciate it.
Umair Irfan: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Brian Lehrer: That's our climate story of the week.
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