Groundwater fouled by fracking

Groundwater fouled by fracking by Tim Wall, May 9, 2012, Discovery News
Clean-burning natural gas may not be all it is fracked-up to be. Groundwater in the eastern United States could be contaminated by the natural gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, after a decade or less, far less time than the thousands of years proponents of the mining technique claim. … In a controversial computer simulation, however, hydrologist Tom Myers suggested that the rock is more permeable than earlier studies predicted and that, once fractured, the rock allows the toxic fracking liquid to percolate upwards. Groundwater above natural gas deposits in other areas could be even more susceptible to pollution from fracking. “One would have to say that the possible travel times for a similar thing in Arkansas or Northeast Texas is probably faster than what I’ve come up with,” Myers told ProPublica. … Fracking has already been associated with earthquakes. A US Geological Survey study watched the number of quakes increase from a historical baseline of 20 tremors a year to 50 in 2009, 87 in 2011 and a 134 last year. The USGS study suggested that dumping fracking wastewater underground was lubricating seismic faults.