OPINION (Charisma) – While seismologists in Israel believe they have found the cause of earthquake swarms centered around the Sea of Galilee, prophecies abound that seem to provide better answers. After a swarm of earthquakes registering a magnitude of 3-4, shook northern Israel in 2013 and 2018, Dr. Nadav Wetzler, a seismologist at the Geological Survey of the Ministry of Energy, and hydrologist Dr. Eyal Shalev wondered whether there was a connection between the tremors and extraction of water from ground wells in the region. It has long been known that earthquakes can be caused by injecting water into the ground, as is done in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technique used to break open rocks and release
natural gas or petroleum, but a connection between water extraction and earthquakes was unknown. Water shortages and the water level dropping in the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) led to increased reliance upon drilling water wells in the 1990s. Dr. Wetzler led a study by the Geological Survey of Israel, and in his paper published last week in Geophysical Research Letters, he suggested that the continuous groundwater extraction from several wells in the region did indeed trigger the earthquake swarms. “It’s a collection of wells that go down several tens or hundreds of meters into the freshwater aquifer,” Dr. Nadav Wetzler, a seismologist at the Geological Survey of the Ministry of Energy, told Hebrew language news Yedioth Ahronoth this week. READ MORE
