August 25, 2014

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Earthquakes in Napa, Iceland and... Ohio?

Photos are everywhere today of wine bottles, and in some cases wine barrels, broken on the floors of Napa Valley, the famous wine region in California–dashed to the ground by a magnitude 6.0 earthquake that struck there early Sunday.

By Mark Fischetti

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Photos are everywhere today of wine bottles, and in some cases wine barrels, broken on the floors of Napa Valley, the famous wine region in California--dashed to the ground by a magnitude 6.0 earthquake that struck there early Sunday.

News outlets are also filing regular reports from Iceland, where thousands of small earthquakes have occurred in the past week in the region around the Bardarbunga volcano. Geologists say the tremors are being caused by magma that is moving below ground there, and they are using the locations of the quakes to track the magma’s movement.

Of course central California is close to major geological faults we’ve known about, and it makes sense that massive volumes of moving magma would shimmy the surface above. But increasingly, human activity is causing earthquakes as well. A magnitude 5.1 quake in Spain in 2011 that leveled a town and killed nine people has been tied to farming. For decades many farmers pumped so much water up from below ground for irrigation that the water table dropped by as much as 250 meters, and scientists maintain that the change in water pressure caused faults to shift, triggering an earthquake.

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Pumping volumes of wastewater from fracking operations back underground has been blamed for an earthquake in Ohio. Oil drilling has been implicated in quakes in California, Oklahoma and Illinois. And water piling up behind new dams in China has been sited as the cause of temblors there.

More on how humans are shaking the earth is in the Scientific America Instant Egghead video below.

Rights & Permissions

Mark Fischetti was a senior editor at Scientific American for nearly 20 years and covered sustainability issues, including climate, environment, energy, and more. He assigned and edited feature articles and news by journalists and scientists and also wrote in those formats. He was founding managing editor of two spin-off magazines: Scientific American Mind and Scientific American Earth 3.0. His 2001 article “Drowning New Orleans” predicted the widespread disaster that a storm like Hurricane Katrina would impose on the city. Fischetti has written as a freelancer for the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian and many other outlets. He co-authored the book Weaving the Web with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, which tells the real story of how the Web was created. He also co-authored The New Killer Diseases with microbiologist Elinor Levy. Fischetti has a physics degree and has twice served as Attaway Fellow in Civic Culture at Centenary College of Louisiana, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 2021 he received the American Geophysical Union’s Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism. He has appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN, the History Channel, NPR News and many radio stations.

More by Mark Fischetti

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