I recently came across an article referenced on the KPBS website which I found troubling. What stopped me was the contrasting, definitive “probably not” which could just as easily been “possibly, yes.”

Mr. Charles Q. Choi’s article is uncomfortably reminiscent of the studies financed by the tobacco industry which claimed that cigarette smoking was not harmful.

The author neglected to mention the number of fracking sites, as well as the amount of – and rate at which – fracking material is injected. That the compounds within the fracking material are flat-out poisonous, is another conversation.

According to testimony by the governor of Oklahoma this past week over 95,000 well sites in the state had been fracked.

According to Dr. Robert Myers compelling article 4-7 million gallons of fracking compound are injected at high pressure into our earth for each site.

Using a conservative 5,000,000 as a working number, that’s about 475,000,000,000 gallons of material, at an injection rate of, “up to 100 MPa (15,000 psi) and 265 L/s (100 barrels per minute)” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing).

There is no disputing the number of earthquakes which accompany fracking operations. I am certain that many readers would like to see a list of Mr. Choi’s referenced seismologists (and their employers) as an addendum to this article.

In a recent related article, seismologist Austin Holland is quoted as having said, “”You have an earthquake that occurs, and that changes the stress ever so slightly next to it, and so another earthquake occurs, and it’s just sort of like a zipper unzipping. It kind of just goes down the line.”

Dr. Randy Keller’s statement, “We have an unstable situation here, and it’s one reason why oil and gas is available here in the first place,” raises a host of other questions.

Leaving the spectre of long-term poisoning of our nation’s fresh water to wall street speculators, tree-huggers, and hippie-environmentalists, it would be a pity if Scientific American was discovered to be skewing facts in order to be a public relations venue for the oil and gas industries.