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Quake Debate: Science Questioned while State's Earthquake Studies Go Unfinished

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COPYRIGHT: Tulsa World

Inside a cluttered metal shed behind his rural Noble County home, Mark Crismon stares at a glowing laptop screen.

The spiked heartbeat crawling across the screen tells him what he already knows: The earth is shaking. Again.

“What you’re looking at here is a 3.6 earthquake,” Crismon says, pointing to the bright blue, green and red lines.

This quake happened 30 minutes ago near Oklahoma’s northern border with Kansas, he explains, taking a drag from his cigarette. Crismon won't need to wait long before feeling the ground rumble under his own home, four miles from an injection well used to collect oil-field wastewater.

“Basically what they’ve done is they’ve pulled the cork out of the bottle, and the genie is gone and you can’t put it back. And nobody wants to do anything about it,” says Crismon, 75.

Crismon says his house is "shredded" from the shaking. Since September, he has monitored a seismic station on his property as part of a research project conducted by Oklahoma State University geology students.

Crismon’s home northeast of Stillwater lies in a broad swath of central Oklahoma that is being rattled by earthquakes that are increasing both in number and intensity.

Last year, the state experienced 585 earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or higher, more than in the past 35 years combined. That figure earned Oklahoma the title of the most seismically active among the contiguous 48 states.

The state has about 3,200 active disposal wells, where water produced during oil and gas drilling is injected deep underground. The United States Geological Survey and several scientific studies have attributed Oklahoma's spike in earthquakes to these wastewater disposal wells, but key state officials say they need more evidence.

"At this point in time, I don’t think we have enough information to truly understand what is causing earthquakes," Gov. Mary Fallin told the Tulsa World. "We know a lot of it’s just natural earthquakes that have occurred since the beginning of the earth, but there has been some question about disposal wells."

ABOUT THIS SERIES: Over the past two months, the Tulsa World reviewed hundreds of documents and analyzed data files on Oklahoma earthquakes. The World also interviewed dozens of people impacted by the issue statewide. Read More Here: