On February 27, 2010, just after 3:30 in the morning local time, a 430-mile fault snapped off the coast of Chile, displacing up to 30 feet of the seabed and coast. GPS units in the city of Conception were rendered inaccurate by 10 feet in a manner of minutes, as the city jumped to the west. It also knocked the Earth about a bit on its axis. A tsunami flooded a wide swath of the coastline and rolled across the Pacific, causing evacuations in Hawaii.
On March 11, 2011, just after quarter-to-three on a Friday afternoon local time, a significant section of the Pacific Ocean suddenly jumped beneath the Japanese island of Honshu. It thrust parts of the island eastward by nine feet, generated massive tsunami that killed 20,000 people and damage all around the Pacific Ocean, dramatically swayed skyscrapers across Japan, South Korea, and even China, caused a nuclear power plant crisis that affected hundreds of thousands more, and like the Chilean quake knocked the Earth about a bit on its own axis
April 12, 2012 bought a pair of giant quakes off Indonesia. Unique in their own right, they represent the beginning of a new tectonic boundary as Australia continues to plow its way northward into Indonesia (and then eventually into the Philippines and then ultimately, mainland China.) They thankfully did not cause the chaos, death, and destruction the other two massive quakes did.
The seismic waves from these quakes ripped across North America, unfelt by human beings. However as they did so, the feather-touch of their passing tickled a number of regions already under strain from an anthropogenic cause- Fluid-injection, from gas and oil extraction- and other regions under strain from natural causes. The regions lit up with small earthquakes in the days that followed. However, more interestingly, in Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, these tiny earthquakes were harbingers of larger moderate (and in Colorado and Oklahoma, damaging) quakes that occurred, in September, November, and August of 2011, respectively.
A group of new studies adds to an increasingly growing body of research that a variety of human activities can and do create earthquakes.
The continued bad news? Injecting waste-water into the ground can cause earthquakes. The silver lining? Sometimes we get a tool to see them coming or stop the larger quakes from happening by ceasing activity, provided you have a large and distant earthquake to provide remote triggering.
Now it’s not that this is news to anyone paying attention. This has been known for the better part of 60 years. However with gas and oil extraction increasing across the United States in addition to an expansion of green geothermal energy production we're seeing this happen more and more, and it's a problem.