(Bloomberg View) — Not so many years ago, earthquake science was no more relevant to Oklahoma than marine biology. But these days the state is shaking way more often than California, and giving many people there an unwanted crash course in seismology.

Last year, Oklahoma had 585 earthquakes with a magnitude 3.0 or greater (big enough for people to easily feel) — almost three times as many as California had and up from an average of just two a year before 2009. Not coincidentally, that's when oil and gas drillers began injecting wastewater from fracking operations into thousands of underground wells. In the past week alone, Oklahomans have felt the earth move eight times — which is probably eight times more than nature intended them to. It's enough to get officials, even in a drilling-friendly state, to take action to manage wastewater wells.

The phenomenon isn't mysterious. Geologists have known for many decades that when pressure underground is changed — when people inject water, for example, or extract geothermal energy – - latent earthquakes can be triggered. While the great majority of fracking-wastewater wells have no such effect, some — especially those in which great volumes of water reach crystalline basement rock that lies close to a fault — induce earthquakes that otherwise might not have happened for hundreds of years.