Feature Writing

Journalism isn't just about straight news stories with short ledes that get right to
the point. Feature writing breaks out of the hard-news format and allows the
creative types among us to tell stories in a more creative and compelling way.

How To Write a Feature Story

What Are Feature Stories?

 Feature stories are human-interest articles that focus on particular people, places and
events. 
 
 Feature stories are journalistic, researched, descriptive, colorful, thoughtful, reflective,
thorough writing about original ideas. 
 

 Feature stories cover topics in depth, going further than mere hard news coverage by
amplifying and explaining the most interesting and important elements of a situation or
occurrence. 
 

 Feature stories are popular content elements of newspapers, magazines, blogs,

websites, newsletters, television broadcasts and other mass media.

While journalists reporting late-breaking hard news don't have enough preparation time and
copy length to include much background and description, writers of features have the space and
time to evoke imagery in their stories and fill in details of the circumstances and atmosphere.
 A feature story is not meant to report the latest breaking news, but rather an in-depth
look at a subject. 
 
 Feature articles range from the news feature that provides sidebar background to a
current event hard news story, to a relatively timeless story that has natural human
interest. 
 

 Features generally are longer than hard-news articles because the feature penetrates
deeper into its subject, expanding on the details rather than trying to concentrate on a
few important key points. 
 

 In hard news stories, often referred to as inverted pyramid style, the reporter makes the
point, sets the tone, and frames the issue in the first paragraph or two. 
 

 In a feature story, on the other hand, the writer has the time and space to develop the
theme, but sometimes postpones the main point until the end. The whole story does not
have to be encapsulated in the lead.

Typical types 

There are many kinds of feature stories. Here are some popular types:
  Human Interest: The best-known kind of feature story is the human-interest story that
discusses issues through the experiences of another. 
 
 Profiles: A very common type of feature is the profile that reveals an individual's
character and lifestyle. The profile exposes different facets of the subject so readers will
feel they know the person. 
 

 How-To: These articles help people learn by telling them how to do something. The
writer learns about the topic through education, experience, research or interviews with
experts. 
 

 Historical Features: These features commemorate important dates in history or turning

points in our social, political and cultural development. They offer a useful juxtaposition
of then and now. Historical features take the reader back to revisit an event and issues
surrounding it. A variation is the this date in history short feature, which reminds people
of significant events on a particular date. 
 

 Seasonal Themes: Stories about holidays and the change of seasons address matters
at specific times of a year. For instance, they cover life milestones, social, political and
cultural cycles, and business cycles. 
 

 Behind the Scenes: Inside views of unusual occupations, issues, and events give
readers a feeling of penetrating the inner circle or being a mouse in a corner. Readers
like feeling privy to unusual details and well kept secrets about procedures or activities
they might not ordinarily be exposed to or allowed to participate in.

Non-fiction stories 

Feature stories are journalistic reports. They are not opinion essays or editorials. They should
not be confused with creative writing or works of fiction.
 The writer's opinions and attitudes are not important to the story. 
 
 The writer keeps herself or himself out of the story. 
 

 Writing in the third person helps maintain the necessary distance.

Telling stories 

Hard news stories report very timely events that have just occurred. Feature stories, on the
other hand, are soft news because they are not as timely, not as swiftly reported. Feature
writers have the extra time to complete background research, interviews and observation for
their stories. 

Here are some suggestions for polishing feature writing skills and developing an eye for feature
story ideas.
  Feature stories give readers information in a pleasing, entertaining format that highlights
an issue by describing the people, places, events and ideas that shape it. 
 
 Feature stories are really more like nonfiction short stories than hard news stories. 
 

 While there should a news peg for the existence of a story at a particular time, the
immediacy of the event is secondary in a feature story. In fact, sometimes there is no
immediate event. 
 

 The power of a feature story lies in its ability to amplify the focus on an issue through
first-rate story telling, irony, humor, human appeal, atmosphere and colorful details. 
 

 Features have a clear beginning, middle and end and are longer than hard-news stories.

Gathering data (Feature writing is based on FACTS)

Journalists use three tools to gather information for stories: observation, interview and
background research.

After completing these, the writer brings the story to life through colorful description, meaningful
anecdotes and significant quotes.
 These elements are obtained when interviewing and observing by jotting down
everything encountered – smells, noises, colors, textures, emotions, details seen and
heard in the surroundings. 
 
 The journalist keeps an open mind while interviewing subjects and researching sources. 
 

 The writer avoids steering the story or imposing personal ideas on the sources. 
 

 The writer avoids deciding on the theme of the story until sufficient information has been
gathered to show a direction or point of view.

Story format 

The information in a feature is organized differently from hard news stories. Sometimes a writer
uses several paragraphs of copy at the outset to engage the reader before getting on with the
main elements of the story. 

After the title and opening paragraph grab a reader, narrative hooks are used to persuade the
reader to continue reading. These hooks are attractive story elements such as action, mystery,
drama or appealing characters intended to pull the reader forward through the story. They are
complex narratives that come to life through colorful description, meaningful anecdotes and
significant quotes.
 In hard news stories, the reporter makes the point, sets the tone, and frames the issue in
the first paragraph or two. 
 
  In feature stories, the whole story does not have to be encapsulated in an inverted
pyramid lead. The writer can develop the storyline in a variety of ways and choose to
postpone the main point until later in the copy or even the end.

A writer can choose to tell the story out of order to engage the reader's interest.
 A story could begin with a dramatic moment and, once the reader is curious, the story
could flash back to the history needed to understand it. 
 
 A story-within-a-story could be used with a narrator in the outer story telling the inner
story to satisfy the curiosity of readers. 
 

 A storyline could alert readers that the story began in a way that seemed ordinary, but
they must follow it to understand what happened eventually.

As with any news reporting, feature stories are subject to the journalistic standards of accuracy,
fairness and precision. The quality of a story is judged on its content, organization and
mechanics. 

Features writers use The Associated Press Stylebook for correct journalistic style. 

How long are these articles?

 Newspaper features often are 500 to 2500 words in length. 
 
 Magazine features usually are 500 to 5,000 words. 
 

 Features on websites and blogs generally range from 250–2500 words, but hard drive
space is relatively inexpensive so the length could vary dramatically through the use of
non-linear hyperlinking of content. 
 

 Any medium might use a shorter or longer story than usual, depending on its perceived
value. 
 

 Attention spans seem to grow ever shorter so brevity is valued. More than ever, all
writing today needs to be clear and concise.

Illustrations 

Every story is illustrated, usually with one or more photographs, but the art can be drawings,
paintings, sketches, video or machinima, colorful graphs and charts, or other creative
expressions depending on the medium for which the feature is packaged for dissemination. 

Is this just for print journalists? 

As newspapers and other print media face stiffer competition today from Internet news media,
more feature stories are published because they can be more engaging to read. Wire services,
such as the Associated Press and reuters, which once distributed mostly hard news, now send
feature stories to members. 

Public relations professionals frequently write feature articles. For instance, a company
newsletter story profiling employees voluntarily helping the local community could benefit
employees and their families as well as the firm's stockholders. Or a profile of a corporate CEO
could be released to media when the firm makes news. 

Broadcast journalists use human interest stories, profiles, historical pieces, seasonal packages,
behind the scenes revelations and even how-to descriptions. These can be seen and heard
everywhere in television and radio news. 

A typical television news package includes an edited set of video clips for a story narrated by a
reporter following a written script. Unlike a magazine article, for example, the TV feature story
also will have audio, video, graphics and video effects. A news anchor with an over-the-shoulder
graphic will be seen reading a lead-in introduction before the package is aired and concluding
the story with additional information called a tag.

Writing in the Sciences

The basic principles of good writing apply just as well to the sciences as they do to the
humanities and the social sciences. A science paper should be written in a clear and
concise style, its paragraphs should be coherent, and its ideas should be well organized.
This handout focuses on the features of science writing that distinguish it from other, non-
scientific genres. Since some of these features may vary from subject to subject, it focuses on
those principles and conventions that are common to most areas of science. Understanding
how the distinctive features of science writing reflect the activities and goals of science will help
you become a more proficient writer of scientific prose.

Audience
All writers should be aware of their audience. But science writers need to pay particularly close
attention to audience because readers of science-related writing can have very different levels
of knowledge. The key question to ask is always, Am I writing for fellow scientists or for a
general audience? What your readers know or do not know will have a significant effect on both
substance and style.

Titles

Titles in humanities and social science papers are, as a rule, sentence fragments. In science
papers they can be either fragments or full sentences, though usually they are fragments:

The risk of lymphoma development in autoimmune diseases: a meta-analysis

A full-sentence title is good at highlighting one central result:

Brain natriuretic peptide is a potentially useful screening tool for the detection of cardiovascular disease
in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.
As this example illustrates, titles in the sciences can be long. Do your best to make sure that
every word counts. Be concrete, but avoid excessive detail.

Some titles are framed as questions, which can succinctly identify just what the authors aim to
discover:

Are there schizophrenics for whom drugs may be unnecessary or contraindicated?

Headings

If you write a humanities essay in university, you will not be encouraged to use headings. The
opposite will be true of your science papers. Headings emphasize the systematic nature of
scientific enquiry. They also provide an excellent organizational tool, often relieving you of the
need to create smooth transitions between the main parts of your paper. Take advantage of
them!

In some scientific genres, the sections and heading names are predetermined. For example,
scientific studies as well as lab reports are typically divided into the following sections: Abstract,
Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion. The list may vary slightly according to the discipline,
the course, or the journal. For complicated experiments, you may subdivide sections into
subsections, each with its own subheading. (To learn more about writing up experiments, visit
our handout on the lab report.)

Headings are not always obligatory. In a shorter paper, they may sometimes prove more of a
hindrance than a help. Use them only if you find that they actually help you to better organize
the material.

Jargon
The word jargon generally refers to language that is unrecognizable to most people, either
because it is deliberately obscure and needlessly difficult, or because it forms part of the
technical terminology common to a discipline. The first type of jargon should be avoided
whatever discipline you are writing in. It can sound pretentious, and it obscures meaning. The
second type of jargon does not carry the same negative connotation. In the sciences, and
sometimes in other disciplines as well, this technical language can be indispensable. Consider
the following passage from a fourth-year geology paper on competing theories about the
extinction of the dinosaurs:
The cretaceous period was a time of great change for land plants. It is thought to have seen the origin of
the angiosperms, which exploded in diversity and prominence through the period. It was also a period
which saw large numbers of extinctions. These are extremely well documented in the fossil record of
marine organisms, and less so for land plants. At or near the end of the cretaceous period, groups such as
dinosaurs, belemnites, rudist bivalves, ammonites, and many others went extinct.

The intended audience for this paper consists of fellow geologists. The writer can thus count on
her readers to know what each of the technical terms means. She does not use jargon here to
make her writing sound sophisticated; outside of the scientific terms, the language is simple.
The main function of such jargon is compression. The dictionary definition of each of these
terms is two or three lines long. If the paper had provided definitions, it would have been
considerably longer, and the flow of the argument would have suffered.
Science writing commonly relies on a further form of compression: replacing frequently used
terms consisting of more than one word with an abbreviation, typically formed from the term's
initial letters. The convention is to specify the abbreviation in parentheses immediately after the
first use of the term:

The incidence of acute otitis media (AOM), one of the most common diagnoses among children, appears
to be increasing. Data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys (NAMCS) indicate that the
number of office visits for otitis media increased more than twofold from 1975 to 1990. Although the
NAMCS does not differentiate between AOM and otitis media with effusion, the majority of these cases
are believed to represent AOM. (Pediatrics 108:239)

If you are writing about science for non-scientists, you can still rely on jargon to achieve
compression, but you should at least let your reader know what any uncommon term means the
first time around. Try to avoid abbreviations, however, unless they are commonly used (e.g.,
AIDS for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome).

Sometimes you may think jargon is necessary in your science writing when it is not. Rather than
achieving concision, such jargon will usually make your prose long-winded and even
impenetrable. Is there any good reason for a sentence like the following?

Members of the medical establishment are not presently cognizant of efficacious treatments resulting in
the complete elimination of symptomatology in acute viral nasopharyngitis.

Why not simply say this?

There is no known cure for the common cold.

Always ask if there is a simpler, more transparent way of making a point.

At the same time, train yourself to read critically the language in published scientific work. If
some of the sentences leave you confused, then the science may be intrinsically difficult, the
writing may be weak, the ideas themselves may be confused, or the writer may be trying to
gloss over something. Unraveling an unclear sentence can sometimes provide important insight
into the problems with someone else's argument. Moreover, developing your critical reading
skills will help you to grow as a writer.
To learn more about how to write in clear and concise manner, visit our handout on wordiness. 

Passive versus Active Voice

In humanities and many social science papers, students should try to use active voice whenever
possible. But historically the sciences have encouraged the use of passive voice. There's a
reason for this tradition. Passive voice helps emphasize the objectivity of the sciences:

The element radon was discovered in 1900.

This stress on objectivity makes especially good sense in the context of a lab report: after all,
the experiment is not about you but about what you did.

Nevertheless, in the past several years there has been a movement in the sciences away from
the passive voice. One reason for this is a philosophical shift in our thinking about science: we
are more ready to acknowledge the role of the observer or investigator in the shaping of
knowledge. In fact, many journals editors have responded to a growing demand for greater
transparency in science by requiring that published scientific papers clearly identify the role and
the source of funding of each contributor. Active voice does a much better job of emphasizing
agency—the idea that every action has an actor. The other good reason behind this growing
preference for active voice is stylistic: often passive voice is simply more awkward, less direct,
and less clear.

Learn some simple sentence patterns that will help your writing benefit fully from the directness
of active voice. For example, refer to figures, tables, and equations at the beginning of the
sentence rather than at the end.

Figure 1 illustrates the quadratic relationship between distance and velocity.

Do the same with words and phrases such as "results," "studies", and "evidence":

Experimental evidence shows that the typical dose-response curve has an inverted J-shape.

If you are referring to a technique or procedure, you can also achieve greater directness by
making it the subject of your sentence:

PCR analysis produced clones of the toxin B DNA originally isolated in cultures of C. difficile from
hospital patients.

And even though your course instructor may dissuade you from using "I" or "we," do not shy
away from placing other scientists in the subject position:

Peto provided a detailed description of the logrank test in his 1977 article on the use of survival analysis
in long-term randomized trials.

Note that even the use of the first-person pronouns, "I" and "we," is becoming more acceptable
in scientific discourse, though generally still not as acceptable as active voice. Course
instructors, TAs, and journal editors can all take very different positions on this question. The
only way to be sure is to ask. When "I" or "we" is not allowed, the passive voice is sometimes
unavoidable.

Even in disciplines where both active voice and first-person pronouns are acceptable, the rules
may be different for lab reports, at least for the Methods section. Some lab instructors insist
firmly on passive voice (in past tense) throughout that section: in other words, they do not
accept any active constructions, even if you avoid using "I" and "we." But the rules have
loosened up considerably outside of the academy. Several journals now permit first-person
active constructions even in the Methods section, and a few courses have followed suit. If you're
writing a lab report and you're not sure of the rules, consult your lab manual or your TA.
Whatever the rules for your course, be careful to comply with them. But remember that such
rules usually apply only to the Methods section. Don't let the habits you cultivate for that specific
part of a lab report hamper you unnecessarily in the rest of your science writing.

To learn more about voice in academic writing, visit our handout on passive voice.
Tense

The two most common tenses in science papers are present and past. Future and present
perfect rank a distant third and fourth.

Use present tense when you are making assertions about nature or about concepts:

Turtles are bigger than beetles.

Use past tense when you are describing what you or someone else did or asserted:

Darwin observed the difference in adaptability between turtles and beetles.

Use future tense when you lay out your plan in a proposal:

In my final project, I will compare survival strategies in turtles and beetles.

Note that the use of first-person singular is often appropriate in a proposal.

Use present perfect when you are describing what you have done repeatedly in the past
continuing up to the present:

Over the past several months I have collected data on turtles and beetles.

Observe that we can mix tenses in a single sentence, and indeed we often need to:

Darwin observed that beetles are more adaptable than turtles.

The use of past tense in describing someone else's work is one key difference between science
and the humanities. In the humanities, when we are describing what a writer, an artist, or a
scholar asserted, we think of ourselves as engaging in a conversation that takes place in the
eternal present:

Shakespeare compares the poet's lover to a summer's day.

The one exception would be when the emphasis is on history, in which case the past tense is
called for:

Shakespeare wrote many of his tragedies during a period of great political instability.

The sciences see the contribution of any individual as adding progressively to an ordered
sequence of investigations. The past tense helps convey a sense of this temporal progression.

References

Science courses rely increasingly on the citation-sequence system of referencing. The details
may differ slightly depending on your discipline, but generally you list references on a separate
page at the end of the paper in numerical sequence according to the order in which sources are
cited in the paper, rather than in alphabetical order. In the body, you insert the reference
number in the appropriate place (within parentheses or as a superscript), repeating a previous
number if you have already cited the same source earlier. The citation-sequence system
minimizes clutter and allows readers to find references quickly.

Some science courses rely on the name-year system. Like the APA system commonly used in
the social sciences, this system lists sources alphabetically and places a greater emphasis on
dates than the citation-sequence and the MLA systems do. Though less streamlined than the
citation-sequence system, the name-year system offers two advantages: it produces more
easily searchable and therefore more useful reference lists, and it lets the reader know in the
body of the paper when studies were performed.

EXAMPLE

What and when babies first eat may affect diabetes risk

Infants at risk of type 1 diabetes who receive their first solid foods between ages 4
months and 6 months appear less likely to develop the condition than others given
solid food before or after that time window, a new study finds.

Type 1 diabetes, which can strike children at any age, occurs when an aberrant
immune reaction kills cells in the pancreas, requiring a person to take insulin shots.
Two studies in 2003 found an association between early first foods and the
presence of rogue antibodies, a warning sign of type 1 diabetes. The new findings
go an important step further, tracking babies long enough to see who developed
diabetes, says Kendra Vehik, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida in
Tampa.

The new study, which appears July 8 in JAMA Pediatrics, included 1,835 children in
the Denver area who had reached at least age 7. They were at high risk because
they either carried a genetic trait that increased their risk for the disease or had a
parent or sibling with type 1 diabetes. Of the 53 children with diabetes, 28 had had
their first exposure to solid food before age 4 months, roughly double the risk of
kids who had started eating food at age 4 to 6 months.

Babies who had eaten their first foods later than age 6 months had a tripled risk.
But very few children were started on solid foods that late, so study coauthor Jill
Norris, an epidemiologist at the University of Colorado in Denver, says she’s unsure
of the reliability of that risk.

The study also suggests an increased risk from introducing fruit before 4 months
and rice and oats after 6 months, but those findings aren’t statistically strong
enough to implicate the timing of those particular foods in diabetes risk, Norris
says.

More interesting, she says, was a finding that babies who were breast-fed when
they were introduced to wheat were about half as likely to develop type 1 diabetes
as were infants not breastfed while starting on wheat. Researchers know that
infants’ immune systems are still a work in progress. One hypothesis holds that first
solid foods might overstimulate the immune system, Norris says. How that would
affect the complex immune reaction that causes type 1 diabetes, or whether
breast-feeding might prevent it in some cases, remains unknown.

Every six years, Earth spins slightly faster and then slower

The world turns slightly faster and slower on a regular 5.9-year cycle, a new study
suggests. Researchers also found small speed changes that happen at the same
time as sudden alterations in Earth’s magnetic field.

The world’s rotation speed can change slightly, by up to milliseconds per day,
because of shifts in winds or the movement of fluid in Earth’s interior. Scientists can
measure how fast the Earth spins by observing distant objects in space and timing
how long they take to come back into view — that is one day length.

The new study, published in the July 11 Nature, found trends in day length after
subtracting the effect of weather, allowing researchers to home in on the effect of
Earth’s fluid core.

Scientists have previously found hints of six-year oscillations in day length, which
occur at the same time as larger, slower changes. But the new analysis revealed
that the cycle is remarkably regular, with the maximum change in day length
occurring once every 5.9 years. Using decades’ worth of data, the researchers
found that the oscillations maintained this precise timing and strength for half a
century. “That’s got to be saying something important,” says geophysicist Bruce
Buffett of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study.
It’s too early to say exactly what causes the oscillations, he adds.

This regularity undercuts one hypothesis for the cause of the cycles: fluctuations in
the sun’s energy, which are more variable, says study author Richard Holme of the
University of Liverpool in England. Instead, the cycle must be caused by something
inside the Earth.

Holme’s team also detected sudden, tiny increases and decreases in the Earth’s
rotation speed that coincided with abrupt changes in the behavior of Earth’s
magnetic field, known as geomagnetic “jerks.” The new day-length data could help
scientists understand what causes the mysterious jerks, Buffett says.

Along with hinting at what’s going on in Earth’s core, the research may help
improve geomagnetic forecasts, which are crucial in mining exploration and drilling.

Huge quakes may foretell smaller, human-caused ones

Giant, distant earthquakes may help scientists identify places where humans are
liable to set off smaller tremors when they inject fluid deep into geologic deposits.

Scientists have known for decades that injecting huge volumes of liquid
underground — such as waste from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — can set off
quakes. But in most cases it doesn’t, and scientists can’t predict when or where
such human-induced earthquakes will happen.
In the July 12 Science, seismologists report that massive earthquakes unleash
seismic waves that can trigger tremors near wastewater disposal wells half a world
away. The tiny quakes may be a warning sign that a fault is close to rupture.

“When we do see remote triggering, it seems to foreshadow larger induced

earthquakes,” says coauthor Nicholas van der Elst of Columbia University’s Lamont-
Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. “It shows the faults are reaching a
tipping point.”

Concerns over human-caused quakes have grown in recent years as earthquake

activity has shot up in unexpected places. From 1967 to 2000, the central and
eastern United States experienced an average of 21 earthquakes per year of
magnitude 3 or greater. From 2010 to 2012, the region saw more than 300 such
quakes, reports William Ellsworth, a seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in
Menlo Park, Calif., in the same issue of Science.

A rise in earthquakes in Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere seems to

coincide with an increase in extracting natural gas and oil from shale formations in
those states. Oil and gas don’t easily flow through impermeable shale, so petroleum
companies drill horizontal wells and pump in pressurized fluid to fracture a small
section of rock (SN: 9/8/12, p.20). This fracking process itself doesn’t cause
earthquakes, Ellsworth says. But the fracking fluid comes to the surface along with
the oil or gas. Contaminated by a mix of chemicals, the fluid is disposed of when
companies inject it deep underground, where it puts pressure on faults.

“Any time we change the fluid regime underground, we could bring a fault closer to
failure,” Ellsworth says.

The United States is home to tens of thousands of wastewater disposal wells. “The
vast majority,” Ellsworth says, “don’t appear to induce earthquakes.” Scientists
don’t understand why only some pose a risk.

The discovery by van der Elst and colleagues may help scientists identify spots
where quakes will pop up. In reviewing seismic activity in the Midwest from 2003 to
2013, the researchers discovered that distant earthquakes appeared to initiate
small tremors near some wastewater disposal wells, which in turn presaged larger
quakes. At each of three sites, in Oklahoma, Texas and Colorado, the team found
spikes in seismic activity in the days following at least one massive earthquake, a
2010 magnitude 8.8 quake in Chile, a 2011 magnitude 9.1 event in Japan and a
magnitude 8.6 earthquake in Sumatra in 2012. Six to 20 months after the initial
tremors, each of the three sites experienced quakes ranging from magnitude 4.3 to
5.7.

The seismic waves from the giant temblors probably perturbed fluids in the faults,
increasing the pressure, van der Elst says. 
If operators can identify when a fault is about to rupture, they can adjust how much
fluid they are injecting into a well or stop the injection altogether. However, the
usefulness of this foreshadowing as a monitoring tool is limited because big
earthquakes that can remotely trigger tremors occur only rarely, says Cliff Frohlich,
a seismologist at the University of Texas at Austin. They happen roughly once a
year.

Another limitation is that not all wastewater sites that produced earthquakes during
the study responded to remote triggering. Van der Elst suggests that when a well is
very close to a fault, just a few months — rather than years or decades — of fluid
injection can build pressure and cause a fault to slip. In these cases, there’s little
chance of a big earthquake happening before the fault reaches its tipping point.

Even with caveats, the work helps scientists better understand the nature of
induced quakes, as does a separate study in Science, published July 11. It may
offer a way to evaluate the seismic risk of pumping water in and outof the ground.
Examining a geothermal field in California, researchers find that the net volume of
water withdrawn mirrored the field’s pattern of seismic activity over the last 30
years. The results could help guide decisions about how much water to extract and
inject at such facilities and shed light on the forces that generate human-related
earthquakes.

In the work, Emily Brodsky and Lia Lajoie, of the University of California, Santa
Cruz, looked at seismic activity from 1981 to 2012 at the Salton Sea geothermal
field, which sits near the southern end of the San Andreas fault in California. At the
geothermal plant, hot water is extracted from the ground to run turbines and then
some of the water is recaptured and put back in the earth. Over the 30 years,
thousands of quakes up to about magnitude 5 took place at the site.   

After statistically accounting for aftershocks, the researchers found that the pattern
of induced quakes over time was related to the volume of water extracted minus
the water injected. Because more water ends up withdrawn than replaced at a
geothermal field, pressure should decline in affected faults. So Brodsky and Lajoie’s
work suggests that rising pressure isn’t the only culprit behind induced quakes.
Other factors, such as subsidence, may place stress on a fault, Brodsky says. “The
balance of emphasis had been on the effect of injected fluid,” she says. “It turns
out there are cases where extraction matters.”

The next step is to study other geothermal fields and wastewater disposal sites to
see if similar relationships turn up. Knowing how the amount of fluids affects
seismic activity is important for l planning, Frohlich says.

For the most part, earthquakes related to wastewater disposal have been small to
moderate and not caused much damage. But such fluid injection has only occurred
for a few decades. It’s too soon to know how risky these wells really are and
whether they are worth the risk, Brodsky says. When such wells were limited to
remote places like West Texas, small rumbles in the ground didn’t bother anyone,
Frohlich adds. Now that they are being built near densely populated areas like
Dallas, people are rethinking the hazards.