Four Earthquakes Rattle Northern Oklahoma in 24 Hours

A 4.3 magnitude earthquake that rattled Northern Oklahoma early Monday morning was the fourth temblor to strike the region in the past 24 hours.
In fact, a dozen-plus earthquakes, ranging from magnitudes of 2.5 to 4.6, have been recorded in the Sooner State since Friday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
There have been 8 earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from 2.5 to 4.6 between Perry and Covington in northern Oklah… https://t.co/YV9unQMP6u— USGS in Oklahoma (@USGS in Oklahoma)1523106607.0
The U.S. Geological Survey recorded the latest quake at 5:22 a.m. local time near the city of Perry, Oklahoma. It's among the largest in the state so far this year and it woke people up as far away as Kansas City, according to the area's National Weather Service.
The 4.3 came less than an hour after a magnitude 3.3 (highlighted in blue below) struck in the same vicinity.
Magnitude 2.5+ earthquakes in Northern Oklahoma in one day. U.S. Geological Survey
The threshold for damage starts around 4.0. A tremor at that magnitude feels like a heavy truck striking a building.
Mike Honigsberg, the emergency management director for the city of Enid and Garfield County, said there are no immediate reports of injury and he is asking residents to submit damage reports to him.
The alarming flurry of earthquakes shaking Oklahoma in recent years has been tied to the large volume of fracking wastewater dumped into the state's injection wells.
State regulators have directed oil and gas producers in the state to close wells or reduce injection volumes. The regulations have worked to a certain degree. While Oklahoma has dropped from two earthquakes per day to fewer than one per day, some of the post-regulatory quakes have been large and damaging.
Two big ones happened in 2016: the 5.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Cushing, one of the largest oil hubs in the world, and a 5.8 that hit near Pawnee, the largest ever recorded in the state.
On Saturday, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission forced oil and gas producer M M Energy Inc to reduce operations on a disposal well in the Perry area.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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