New state-funded sensors are tracking earthquakes across Texas
Three years ago, a series of quakes rattled North Texas — and some residents’ nerves.
Larry Walden, a Parker County commissioner, remembers a public meeting at the time in which residents complained about cracked houses, damaged foundations and even a hen that had stopped laying eggs.
“They were minor earthquakes unless you're in an area affected by it,” Walden said. “Then it's not minor.”
So when a state-funded research team approached the county a year and a half ago about installing a sensor to track seismic activity on a piece of farmland, “we were more than happy,” Walden said. Local officials were eager for “some outside agency to ... hopefully give us some feedback as to what was going on.”
That sensor, installed last year, is just one node in a statewide network called TexNet that monitors quakes and tremors across Texas. Run out of the University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology, the program was created by the Legislature and Gov. Greg Abbott in 2015 after a series of temblors shook the Dallas-Fort Worth region.
Texas saw an uptick in quakes starting in 2008, and a growing body of research has linked fossil fuel activities – specifically the injection of oilfield wastewater into the ground – to the shaking. Industry representatives and state regulators have been wary of acknowledging a connection, arguing more detailed information is needed.
That's where the TexNet Seismic Monitoring program comes in. The goal is for the network of sensors, now collecting data across the state, to suss out the source of the tremors.
More: http://www.cbs7.com/content/news/New-state-funded-sensors-are-tracking-earthquakes-across-Texas-459760093.html
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It's getting awfully hard to ignore. 