News Earth

Tiny tremors can’t always warn when fracking will trigger a bigger quake

Foreshocks might give operators time to stop injections before a damaging quake

A photograph of the town of Peace River in Alberta, which felt a large quake in 2022 due to fracking activities nearby.

Peace River (shown here) in Alberta, Canada, was rattled in 2022 by a magnitude 5.6 earthquake caused by oil extraction activities.

Awmcphee/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

By Carolyn Gramling

Tiny seismic rumbles can warn that human activities such as fracking are putting enough stress on underground faults to trigger a larger earthquake.