more than 2,500 earthquakes greater than magnitude 3.0 have the number of specific water wells , distantly located .
if a fault is close to failure , the amount that the pressure is going up at these locations in our model is enough to push them over the edge dr katie keranen , cornell university in 2011 , a small number of people were injured and 14 houses were destroyed in the town of prague , oklahoma in recent years .
the us state averaged one such quake a year .
“ it really is unprecedented to have this many earthquakes over a broad region like this , ” says study co - author geoffrey abers of cornell university .
their research has been published in the journal , science .
the scientists found that the disposal of water left over from oil drilling and fracking processes is injected into the ground between impermeable layers of rocks to avoid polluting freshwater — could be driving the sharp increase in the sometimes - disastrous earthquake events .
“ most big sequences of earthquakes that we see are either a main shock and a lot of aftershocks or it might be right at the middle of a volcano in a volcanic system or geothermal system .
so you might see little swarms but nothing really this distributed and this persistent .
the surge in seismic activity has shown that processes such as wastewater injection sites .