Fracking does this on a small scale. I had an excellent geology professor, Donald Prothero, who argued manually triggering earthquakes could be a much better idea in high tension areas than waiting for them to happen organically, as we could prepare, and the triggered earthquakes wouldn’t be as bad as waiting for them to happen. But the paperwork would be a nightmare(:
It would be preferable, but a litigation nightmare. If 100 houses fall down due to a natural earthquake, no one gets sued. If 2 houses fall down in a "prescribed burn" earthquake, now the entity that caused the earthquake can be sued.
It's actually impossible to know for certain how much and what size of land you're destabilizing. Duration of expected destabilization is also varying I guess and at least 1 year.
> "Exponential relationship between the total number of earthquakes and the number of wells in the Texas during the study period
1998–2018 with correlation R2=0.726."
It's not fracking itself but actually wastewater injection has a bigger influence in triggering bigger earthquakes according to what I've read. Moreover, it's also known that dams have a significant impact:
> "The devastating earthquake in Sichuan, which took at least 69,000 lives in May 2008, may have been unleashed by the huge Zipingpu Dam. New scientific evidence suggests that the filling of the Zipingpu reservoir may have activated a dormant fault line near the dam site."
Shallow faults are definitely activated. Probability of deep faults activated through full destabilization of a region? Unknown for now.
It's much easier to cause something than to predict when it will happen naturally. As Alan Kay famously said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
