Could oil extraction activity be linked to the recent M7.2/7.5 earthquake doublet in Venezuela (June 2026)?
Hi all,
I've been reading about the recent earthquake doublet that hit Venezuela on June 24, 2026 (M7.2 near San Felipe, followed 39 seconds later by an M7.5 near Yumare/Montalbán, in the Oca–El Pilar fault system where the Caribbean and South American plates interact). Several geologists quoted in the press have attributed it to natural stress transfer between adjacent faults in that tectonic boundary zone.
Given the scale of oil extraction happening in the country, I'm curious whether there's any plausible connection to induced seismicity here. I understand induced seismicity is a real, documented phenomenon (wastewater injection, fluid extraction altering pore pressure near critically stressed faults), but from what I've read it's usually associated with much smaller magnitude events (rarely above M5-5.5), and this fault system has a documented history of major earthquakes going back long before modern oil extraction.
So my question is: is it even physically plausible for extraction activity to act as a "trigger" for an event of this magnitude on a fault that's already accumulating tectonic stress over a ~100-year cycle? Or is the energy/mechanism involved simply too different in scale for that hypothesis to hold up?
Thanks!