Science

UK earthquake: Tremors in Surrey NOT caused by fracking – shock claim


Between April 2018 and 2019, 168 small earthquakes hit Surrey. Many people believed the unexpected upturn in tremors was related to fracking in the area but experts have said this was not the case. Earthquakes are common in many parts of the world but they are rare on the British Isles, as the UK is not situated near the edge of a tectonic plate.

Oil companies have been searching for fossil fuels beneath the surface of a spate of locations in Surrey, a process which started in 2016.

Researchers from Imperial College London, British Geological Survey (BGS) and the University of Bristol said since because two years had passed since fracking began, oil drilling was not to blame.

The study, which focused on seismic readings from the BGS, also stated the earthquake swarm was too far away from the fracking site for it to have caused tremors.

The team found the earthquakes were around 2.5 kilometres deep, while oil is extracted at a depth of just one kilometre. They also said the earthquakes were more than three kilometres from the extraction site.

Lead author Dr Stephen Hicks, of Imperial’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: “The quakes seem to have occurred naturally, and our findings suggest their closeness to oil extraction sites is probably a coincidence.

“It would be unprecedented for this type and scale of oil extraction to affect sites more than a kilometre away.

“The quakes seem to have occurred naturally, and our findings suggest their closeness to oil extraction sites is probably a coincidence.”

While the experts said the earthquakes were not caused by fracking, they could not explain the swarm.

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Dr Hicks continued: “The ground vibrations recorded from earthquakes provide clues that hint at their cause.

“There are increasing examples worldwide of human activity causing earthquakes but it can be difficult to work out which newer cases are natural and which are human-caused.”

However, one possible explanation is that the Surrey quakes were caused by the “ongoing collision of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates in the Mediterranean Sea – the UK’s nearest plate boundary – which stresses the crust and causes earthquakes across Europe,” according to Imperial College.

Dr Hicks added: “This is not the first time earthquakes have come seemingly from nowhere and without human input.

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“Decades of instrumental recordings and hundreds years of historical accounts of earthquakes show that similar seismic swarms have happened in the UK before due to long-term tectonic stresses and without any clear link to human activities.”

Alternatively, it could be possible the tremors were induced by fracking in a link which has yet to be discovered.

Dr Hicks: “If oil extraction caused the earthquakes, then it did so by a mechanism that hasn’t yet been reported anywhere else in the world.

“The more data we have, the more we’ll know about the causes and effects of these earthquakes. Who knows which clues from the ground we’ll pick up in the future.”



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