Dr. David Vanko, the dean of the Jess and Mildred Fisher College of Science and Mathematics and chairman of Maryland’s Marcellus Shale Safe Drilling Initiative Advisory Commission, was quoted in a Carroll County Times story on the importance of adding more seismic sensors before the state ends a ban on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in 2017.
Fracking has not been conclusively linked to earthquakes that occur around drilling sites; scientists blame an extraction process occurring in deep wells for what they call “induced” earthquakes.
While Maryland has not traditionally been known for earthquakes, faults do run beneath the region and have produced recent tremors such as one that rattled Anne Arundel County this month and another that damaged historic buildings across the Mid-Atlantic in 2011.
Another sensor should help geologists learn more about formations hundreds of millions of years old beneath the eastern United States.
