Skepticblog

Drilling natural gas in Pennsylvania's Marcellus shale (Photo credit: Wikimedia)

This week my Skeptoid episode was about fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, the controversial mining technique for deep natural gas deposits. The shock doc Gasland put fracking into the public eye, and not in a very complimentary way. Gasland blamed fracking for putting flammable methane into tap water, for mysterious illnesses caused by its “toxic” fluids, contaminating ground water with poisons, and killing animals, in addition to a host of political conspiracy charges. If you’re wondering why this decades-old practice did not seem to cause any problems before Gasland came out, it’s because Gasland was largely fictional. Most of its charges are based on real phenomena, but fracking itself rarely has anything to do with them. That’s not to say there are no environmental concerns about the practice. There are, to be sure; and the EPA is in the midst of a major study to find out how serious these concerns are. Some of these were discussed in my episode. One, in particular, I omitted: the question of whether fracking causes earthquakes. Continue reading…