I recently moved to New York (Buffalo), a state where fracking is banned completely due to environmental concerns. It has been linked to increased earthquake activity in several other regions where it is performed. I thought it might be interesting to see a comparison to a neighboring state where fracking is legal. Pennsylvania has massive hydrocarbon reserves in the Marcellus Shale geological formation which is present across much of the state (west of the Appalachian range). The map on the left shows a point at each fracked well. I'd take this with a grain of salt as I just plotted coorinates from a public 'Unconventional Well' dataset for Pennsylvania. I suppose there may be other unconventional methods of extraction that aren't fracking. That's ok ... I just wanted to get some data on the page and look at it. It's a similar story for the NY State dataset. I filtered that dataset for 'Horizontal' wells, and while horizontal drilling often indicates fracking I suppose there are times when that isn't the case. Since there are many overlapping points on the first map I thought it would be useful to show a density grid for the points to better capture the data. For each 'cell' or 'pixel' in the area the number of points in that cell are summed. There are probably more interesting things I could do with these huge datasets but for now this is what you get.