“There will be about one under-M5 earthquake per day in the gas field of Groningen, The Netherlands. ”

The Groningen gas field shows exponential growth in earthquake event counts around a magnitude M1 with a doubling time of 6-9 years since 2001. This behavior is identified with dimensionless curvature in land subsidence, which has been evolving at a constant rate over the last few decades essentially uncorrelated to gas production. We demonstrate our mechanism by a tabletop crack formation experiment. The observed skewed distribution of event magnitudes is matched by that of maxima of event clusters with a normal distribution. It predicts about one event