Hundreds of the nation's top meteorologists and disaster recovery experts will converge on Oklahoma City next week for the sixth-annual tornado summit, even though much of the discussion is likely to have more to do with temblors, not twisters.
The previous five years, forecasters and first responders assembled in the gut of Tornado Alley to talk about the natural disasters taking place above ground. Below the surface, thousands of earthquakes were rattling the state.
Two of the temblors, including last September's record magnitude 5.8, were enough to convince the National Tornado Summit and Disaster Symposium organizers to devote a sizeable chunk of this year's event to studying earthquakes.
Nearly all of the quakes can be traced to the underground injection of wastewater left over from oil and gas production.