Environmental Effects Of Fracking

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Recommended: Positive and negative aspects of fracking

Over the past two centuries, the town of Youngstown, Ohio has recorded zero earthquakes. This type of geologic behavior is relatively normal for a city that is not in close proximity to a fault line, places where earthquakes occur often. The city hasn’t recorded an earthquake since before 1776, when officials started recording. When Northstar 1 began injecting waste fluid from Hydraulic Fracturing, however, the earthquakes started to rumble in. From January of 2011 to April of 2014, Youngstown, Ohio has recorded over 200 earthquakes.
Hydraulic Fracturing, or Fracking, has been going on since the 1940’s and has been a lucrative source for oil and gas. Fracking, while having positive economic impacts, also has negative environmental implications that are being brought to light, such as the seemingly unending earthquakes in Youngstown, Ohio. Fracking involves pumping large amounts of water, sand, and chemicals into the Earth to release gas and oil from shale, a type of flat rock. Many of the chemicals are harmful to the health of living organisms, including humans.
Fracking starts by drilling into the Earth for a few miles, and then drilling horizontally for about a mile. Once the pipes are placed, small holes are drilled into the end of the pipe. Then the chemical cocktail is injected. Pressure builds up, causing the rocks to crack, and the mixture seeps into the cracks. The sand props open the cracks for the chemicals to get into. The chemicals help extract the oil and gas that is trapped in the rock.
The process for obtaining frac sand also has some environmental implications. In order to get to the silica sand, miners must wipe out all the flora and fauna that is on top of the ground that needs to be dug up. This leaves nowhe...

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... other accident were to occur, scientists would not know what areas to monitor, and what to monitor those areas for, since companies rarely divulge information about the composition and discharge of their Fracking mixtures.
Fracking has also had impacts on the health of humans. There are twenty seven people who have shown symptoms of poisoning and the poisoning is suspected to be caused by Fracking. Companies have found loopholes in current legislation that prohibits doctors of patients with symptoms of poisoning from revealing any information involving sickness to their patients, in addition to the public. Fracking overall has many destructive impacts on the Earth and its organisms. These issues could be prevented if more legislations and laws were created to keep Fracking from harming the Earth, and if people were more aware of the rising problems with Fracking.

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