by Larry Powell PinP has learned that, years before “fracking” was blamed for a significant earthquake in northern Alberta early this year, a whole series of somewhat smaller quakes was happening in the Horn River Basin of northeastern BC, where fracking reached a peak some four years ago. Researchers representing the Geological Survey of Canada and the BC Oil and Gas Commission reviewed seismographs from the area from 2002 to 2011. They conclude there is a “high likelihood of a physical relationship” between the quakes and the fracking. They detected only 24 local quakes in the Basin in ’02 and ’03, before fracking began. But, by 2011, when fracking peaked, that number had jumped to 131. And so had the magnitude - from 2.9 (on the Richter scale) before fracking, to 3.6 afterward. Then this past January, Alberta’s energy regulator blamed fracking for an earthquake in the northern part of that province, near Fox Creek. According to the CBC, it was “ of 4.4 m
