"“Scores of papers on injection-induced earthquakes were published in the geophysical literature in the following 40-plus years, and the problem was well understood and appreciated by seismologists,” says Bill Ellsworth, a Stanford University geophysicist who launched his career at the USGS while the Rangely experiment was under way. He believes professional skepticism slowed the formation of a consensus. “There were a lot of doubts expressed by very good petroleum engineers that [earthquakes caused by injection wells] were even possible,” he says. “Knowledge of the whole physical process was either lost or had not been effectively communicated to a broad community.”"