Originally Posted: November 13, 2017
The same fault that produced the 4 magnitude earthquake in May 2015 in Johnson County — the strongest ever recorded in North Texas — could create an even larger one in the future, a recent study has found.
Heather DeShon, a seismologist at Southern Methodist University, led the study that focuses on the quake that struck near the town of Venus. The quake in the Bend Arch-Fort Worth Basin was triggered by the underground disposal of wastewater from oil and gas operations, the report concluded.
And it wasn’t the first earthquake on that fault, which is a weakness in the earth’s crust. Earthquakes have been happening in the area since 2008, DeShon said. Her team has also studied the slew of earthquakes in Azle, Reno and Irving.
She says there are many similarities among the earthquakes that happen in the Fort Worth Basin. For one: They all occur in granitic basement rocks.
“If you went down to Austin and you were climbing around the Hill Country and you went to Llano and saw those big, pink Texas rocks, those are what we’re studying,” she said. “Except down in the Fort Worth Basin, those are buried under a large amount of old sediments.”
Those sediments produce the oil and gas that we use for energy purposes in the area, DeShon said. READ MORE