“Once destroyed nature’s beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.” This is a quote from Ansel Adams, who was a photographer and an environmentalist who appreciated nature’s true beauty and understood that the way we were treating the environment was slowly but surely destroying it. In today’s world, where oil and natural gasses have become in shorter supply and higher demand, we have resorted to taking more drastic measures concerning the gathering of these fuels. Hydraulic fracturing is an extreme extraction process that has become more popular over the past decade due to the oil crisis. While it is quite effective, it is also very harmful to the environment, because of all the pollution and damage that the process causes we should stop …show more content…
So the method of fracking is still relatively new and most of the public does not really understand what it is, or more importantly, how it works. Fracking is a process of gathering oil and natural gas from shale, or the sediment like layer of the earth, beneath the surface, by drilling down to the shale and then drilling horizontally through along the layer of shale in order to create a well. Once they have completed the drilling of the well they then pump millions of gallons of slickwater into the well at high velocities so that the shale fractures due to the pressure in turn releasing the oil and or natural gasses that were trapped within the shale. The resulting mixture of the slickwater and the oil then returns to the surface and is harvested by the oil …show more content…
While our research of fracking is still in its beginning phases we have already collected significant amounts of data that have shown its destructiveness. One of the flaws in the fracking process is that the cementing processes used to seal the wells are often rather faulty and tend to leak and release pollutants into the environment. When the seals fail the chemicals from the slickwater are introduced into the ground water of the surrounding areas, a leaky well also releases greenhouse gasses like methane into the air. To be honest, the pollution caused by fracking is not even its worst side effect. The areas that are near the fracking sites are also suffering from the effects of fracking. Recently there has been more information pointing towards the relation between increased fracking in an area and the amount of seismic activity in the area. I believe that this is due to the fact that when they are preforming the fracking process they are actually fracturing the earth’s crust causing damage to the plates and making them more and more unstable. Another way that areas near fracking sites are being hurt is by the fact that the fracking process requires amounts of around 80 million gallons of water for each frack which takes the available water away from the people who need it especially in areas where they are low on water due to