It's the Brian Larra show on WNYcke.

Good morning again everyone.

Now we turn to our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday on the show

last Friday. As you all know, the Northeast experienced a 4.8 magnitude earthquake epicenter New Jersey and while we were

live with our special coverage one question came up a few times that we weren't able to get an answer to and that was could the earthquake have been caused by fracking and while Friday's earthquake was likely the result of a really old fault line moving.

Human activity, like fracking or depleting water reservoirs too quickly, can cause earthquakes.

The US Geological Survey calls these induced earthquakes and

with climate change they could continue to become more common.

Joining us now to discuss the link between fracking and earthquakes is Umeer Orphan, staff writer at Vox, writing about

climate change and energy policy.

Umeer, thanks for coming on today.

Thanks for doing this. My today. Thanks for doing this.

My pleasure, thanks for having me.

And just to be clear, last Friday's earthquake in the Northeast was probably not caused

by fracking or its after effects, right? That's right. This is very likely. not activity that we've seen in the past and it is you know not completely unexpected

that occasionally an earthquake will occur here. But you're right the gargantuan

expansion of hydraulic fracturing across the United States has left an earthquake epidemic in its wake.

So maybe we should do a quick like one minute refresher on what hydraulic fracturing is and then we'll go on to

how much of an earthquake epidemic we're seeing as a result. Right so hydraulic

fracturing is now the most common way we extract oil and gas in the United States.

You may have seen that the US is now the largest oil producer in the world and the largest gas producer,

and this is a big reason why. The way it works though is that in order to

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