On August 16, 2012, residents of the tiny Dutch village of Huizinge were rattled by an inexplicably large 3.6 magnitude earthquake. Gas extraction in the nearby Groningen gas field, one of the largest onshore gas fields in the world, was the trigger. The area typically does not experience natural earthquakes, and this was the worst induced quake to hit the Netherlands to date.
Places like Groningen, India’s Deccan Plateau and Oklahoma are tectonically stable. They don’t sit at the quake-prone boundaries of tectonic plates. What fault lines they do have lie only a few kilometers below the surface, too shallow to trigger significant natural shakes. Even if the rocks