South Carolina Earthquake M4.1: More Thoughts
There will be the inevitable speculation about whether the earthquake yesterday in South Carolina was related to fluid reinjection. One way to think about this is to look at the drilling sites in the United States that may have reinjection wells associated with them. I show such a map below that originates from here. You can see that the number of wells on the border of South Carolina and Georgia (where the earthquake occurred) is rather low, by comparison with other parts of the country.
So at this point, one can say that the event is most likely to have been caused by natural forces rather than by reinjection.
About OpenHazards Bloggers
Steven Ward is a Research Geophysicist at
the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UC Santa Cruz. He specializes in the quantification and simulation of
natural hazards. Read Steve's blog.
John Rundle is a Distinguished Professor of Physics
and Geology at UC Davis and
the Executive Director of the APEC Collaboration for Earthquake Simulations. He
chaired the Board of Advisors for the Southern California Earthquake Center from 1994 to 1996. Read John's blog.