A moderate magnitude 4.3 earthquake hit 14.2 km (9 mi) away from Lubin, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Poland, late in the evening of Wednesday, Aug 13, 2025 at 11.30 pm local time (Europe/Warsaw GMT +2). The quake had a very shallow depth of 13.3 km (8 mi) and was felt by many near the epicenter. The shallow depth of the quake caused it to be felt more strongly near the epicenter than a deeper quake of similar magnitude would.

        • Saleh@feddit.orgEnglish
          6·
          3 days ago

          Mining comes with pumping off water, which takes a lot of weight off of the deeper crust and could lead to tectonic events.

          https://www.science.org/content/article/sea-galilee-earthquakes-triggered-excessive-water-pumping

          To find out, he, Brodsky, and colleagues compared the dates, locations, depths, and magnitudes of the earthquakes to regular measurements of groundwater levels in the region’s aquifer. They found that the quakes, most of which registered relatively harmless magnitudes between 3 and 4, occurred after steep groundwater declines from 2007 to 2013, and again from 2016 to 2018.

          Injecting water into aquifers is thought to trigger earthquakes by increasing the water pressure in pores within the rocks, lubricating faults and allowing them to slip more easily. But how might removing groundwater trigger an earthquake swarm? In a paper published last week in Geophysical Research Letters, the authors suggest a model in which extracting groundwater reduces the gravitational load on a fault—lessening the forces that push rocks on either side of the fault together to keep it locked. “Pulling the water out allows the rocks to kind of relax away from one another, and therefore unclamps the fault,” Brodsky explains.

          It’s a reasonable explanation, says earth scientist Manoochehr Shirzaei at Arizona State University in Tempe. He says scientists have traditionally assumed that freshwater fluid removal can’t easily trigger earthquakes. “This is one of the first studies to show that it can.”