To drill or not to drill

Underground natural gas drilling has Arkansans shaking in their shoes, literally. Fracking, which is when water is shot in the ground at a high pressure to loosen rock and extract natural gas, is causing swarms of earthquakes in Arkansas. Saltwater is a common by-product of the fracking process, and the easiest way to dispose of the product is to inject it back in the ground. Steve Horton, an earthquake specialist at the University of Memphis Center for Earthquake Research and Info said "Ninety percent of these earthquakes that have happened since 2009 have been within 6 kilometers of these salt water disposal wells" (Liu and Kaplan). Horton also pointed out that a similar situation occurred in West Virginia."That isn't a place where you usually have earthquakes," he told FoxNews.com. The West Virginia Oil and Gas Commission made companies cut back on their injection rate and pressure and in doing so the number of quakes lessened dramatically. The correlation between the areas of natural gas drilling and the number of quakes in the area of the drilling can't simply be dismissed as coincidence.