Wend your way through the forest of red and white oak trees just outside the unincorporated township of Leonard, Oklahoma, and eventually you’ll find yourself at Glasnost Road. Glasnost intersects with Observatory Lane—the reflective road signs are written in English and Russian, so you won’t get lost—and there you’ll come across two modest buildings, one enclosed by a high fence and an unexpected redbud tree. This is the campus of the Leonard Geophysical Observatory, where the research scientist Amie Gibson and the seismic research specialist and lab technician Jake Nance do the majority of the daily (and absurdly unrelenting) work of deciphering raw seismic data into magnitudes and locations for the thousands of earthquakes that now shake Oklahoma each year. “Usually we notice the earthquakes first, because my desk starts tap-tap-tapping,” Nance explained. “I hear that, and then I call out to Amie. I say, ‘Has it shown up on the system yet?’ ”

Gibson and Nance, who have worked at the observatory for sixteen and seven years, respectively, used to have quite different days. The observatory’s location was chosen, in 1960, because it was “seismically quiet.” From Glasnost Road, a scientist could, by following the data on the seismographs, tell when, for example, a nuclear bomb was being tested underground in Nevada—there was very little “noise” that interfered with such readings. In 1990, when George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, an agreement that gave the Soviets permission to monitor U.S. nuclear testing and vice versa, the Leonard Observatory was chosen as one of three sites from which the Soviets would “observe.” Leonard’s chief geophysicist at the time, Jim Lawson, learned Russian in anticipation of their arrival. He and a friend nurtured and then, along with a Soviet general, planted an Oklahoma redbud tree. The fence was built around the building for the Soviets, not to keep them in but to assure them that they could keep the Americans out, if they wanted.

Jim Lawson’s daughter, Anna, who was then in middle school, wrote a short piece around that time, which she titled “The Soviet General in Jeans,” which appeared in a brief history of the Leonard Observatory that her father wrote. In it, she notes:

Seven Soviets in casual dress came to inspect the fenced station. They spent a whole week measuring everything. They even checked to see that the electric plugs had the different voltage Russian equipment uses. They said it complied with the treaty, but they were unhappy that the Ladies room door stuck. There were ten Americans in the American escorts or Watchers building outside the fence. They agreed that the United States would fix the door. The Americans were in blue jeans. They looked just like the Soviets.

Seven years later, the Russians had returned home; they gave their portion of the observatory and the surrounding land (leased at a dollar per year) back to the state of Oklahoma. Lawson and his team continued doing basic scientific research and monitoring for underground nuclear tests. They also entertained and educated thousands of kids. “Jim loved taking the groups of kids on fossil hunts. And he would teach them about the Russian Invasion,” Amie told me. “He also took time to explain the science to the media, to schools. He always made time for people.” He was especially devoted to encouraging girls to pursue science.

In 2008, just before the dramatic increase in Oklahoma’s earthquake rate, Lawson was killed in a car crash; a teen-ager trying to send a text message had drifted into his lane. He was sixty-nine. Gibson and Nance have left his office as it was, with rock-climbing helmets hanging on the wall and dozens of binders with hand-labelled titles like “Polarization and FK Analysis” and “TUL BZ.”

I met Gibson and Nance on a sunny afternoon last November, having spent the preceding days at a conference on induced seismicity hosted by the Oklahoma Geological Survey and the United States Geological Survey. I was in Oklahoma to write an article for this magazine about the obfuscation and denial, at the industry, regulatory, legislative, and gubernatorial levels, of well-established science demonstrating that the vast majority of Oklahoma’s earthquakes are man made, caused by the underground disposal of wastewater from oil and gas drilling. The relevant state scientific body, the Oklahoma Geological Survey, didn’t look great, either. It has a poor record in communicating the relevant science to the public, and in setting appropriate, expedient research goals. When speaking with the director of the O.G.S. at the time, I often felt as though I had entered into a dystopic wonderland, where little of what other scientists had clearly established, again and again, seemed to exist.

But my visit to Leonard made me feel that I was in touch with an O.G.S. that was far from the politics of the central office in Norman, and that was wonderfully objective. Gibson and Nance were simply tracking the earthquakes, and they were also taking time to teach schoolkids about science. They led fossil hunts with the kids, collecting crinoid stems and brachiopod shells. (Evolution is not always taught in Oklahoma; my high-school biology textbook came with a sticker that warned that some of the ideas it contained were “just theories.”) The story of the Russians at Leonard Observatory has the feel of a morality tale about how there are no good guys or bad guys, and I like to think that I’ve never really believed in good guys or bad guys, and yet when I visited the Leonard Observatory in November, after the induced-seismicity conference, I had an overwhelming sense, years dormant, of being in the presence of good guys. The old romance of science—of being passionate about the dispassionate observation of nature—still seemed alive in this corner of Oklahoma.

A few days ago, the O.G.S., now under the interim direction of Richard Andrews, announced a decision to close down the Leonard Observatory. Andrews delegated the seismologist Austin Holland to disseminate the O.G.S.’s statement about the decision, which was made in order to “realize real cost-savings” and to monitor the seismic readings “centrally.”

This reasoning is difficult to understand. The seismic data is available via a computer from anywhere. The costs associated with keeping Leonard open have, in recent years, been comparable to the cost of a subscription to HBO Go. The land was gifted to the university decades ago. The equipment will surely need to stay in the ground, and continue to be monitored, and some of it is on free loan from the U.S.G.S. (Money will eventually be needed to upgrade that and other O.G.S. seismic equipment regardless of the observatory’s being kept open or closed.) For the past two years, there has not even been a water bill, because, according to the local water authority, the usage seemed too low to issue an invoice for; in 2013, the bill amounted to $35.20. There is a small electricity bill. Gibson told me that she has a card for expenses, but that she has put nothing on it in the past year—not even paper towels or toilet paper.