Why Oklahoma Shakes

To practice the skills we've learned since November (Python, Pandas, and Matplotlib), we were given our first project. Our team chose to work on analyzing why Oklahoma has been experiencing earthquakes more often than California. I was able to find good data sets from The University of Oklahoma Survey and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, and a good API via the United States Geological Survey. Visit my GitHub for more details on this project.

My team's analysis show that waste water disposals are a big factor to the earthquakes. Below is a scatter plot on a map showing the location of disposal wells and earthquakes in Oklahoma.

Using a horizontal bar plot, we can see the comparison between the injection wells and seismic events on a county level. This data indicates that the number of wells does not correlate to the amount of earthquakes.

Same data used above on a scatter plot. The yellow dot represents Carter county, the red dot represents Grant county.

While there is no correlation between the number of wells and seismic event in a specific location, our analysis below indicates that there is a correlation between the waste water volume being injected and the amount of earthquake events.