Missouri’s Neighbor Shaking – Swarm of 6 Quakes in Kansas

Kansas is known for many things - farming, sunflowers and boring 6 hour drives to cross it. Add earthquakes to that list as a swarm of 6 quakes has just shaken Kansas. That leaves us to wonder why Missouri's neighbor is suddenly shaking so much.

While doing my daily check of the USGS earthquake site, my eyes were immediately drawn to a bunch of dots in the middle of the state of Kansas. These 6 earthquakes all happened Saturday, July 5, 2025. While none were major, they weren't tiny either with the largest being a 2.7 tremor.

All of these quakes happened within a relatively short period of time on Saturday.

What's causing the earthquakes in Kansas?

Kansas does have the Humboldt Fault Zone which produced a 4.9 event as recent as 2014 according to GeoKansas. It's believed that fault is capable of a quake as large as a mid-5 magnitude quake someday, but the belief by many is that recent smaller quakes are caused by humans involved in the oil and gas industry. It's called induced seismicity and is a controversial topic as some are concerned that wastewater disposal and fracking can lead to a damaging quake event. No one is concerned about a swarm of 2 magnitude quakes, but if a larger 5 were to hit near one of the few major Kansas cities, that would be a different issue entirely.