Enlarge / The City of (oil-pumping) Angels, around 1900.
Oklahoma has the unfortunate distinction of becoming the capital of human-induced earthquakes in the US. That’s a recent development that comes thanks to deep injection wells used to dispose of contaminated water from oil and gas production. But the oil and gas industry has a long history with minor seismic activity—one that, it appears, may go back to Los Angeles in the early 1900s.
Los Angeles’ early growth had more to do with petroleum than celluloid. Oil was struck in 1892, and production took off over the next few decades. A recent study reviewed the subsequent history of oil production and earthquakes there but found no signs that earthquakes were triggered by human activity, at least dating back to 1935. The quality of earthquake data drops off rapidly prior to that, but US Geological Survey researchers Susan Hough and Morgan Page decided to see what they could find.
Starting at 1900, they compiled all the personal accounts of shaking they could find. There were a few early seismometers operating, partly the work of seismologist Charles Richter (he of the no-longer-used Richter Scale of earthquake magnitude), though earthquake monitoring didn’t get serious until the 1920s. The limited monitoring left the researchers with only crude constraints on the location and magnitude of most earthquakes, but it’s something.
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Source: Ars Technica – Oil production may have triggered some LA earthquakes in the 1920s