Seismicity triggered by fluid injection–induced aseismic slip
How to observe fault injections in real time
Faults in the ground are known to deform in response to procedures such as wastewater injection that change the pore pressure. Guglielmi et al. took a crack at monitoring this process in real time with a controlled fluid injection into an inactive fault (see the Perspective by Cornet). Reactivating the dead fault induced aseismic slip, which triggered small earthquakes. These observations can inform models of how friction is related to slip rate. The technique can also be applied to field-scale monitoring of seismicity-inducing wastewater injections.
Abstract
Anthropogenic fluid injections are known to induce earthquakes. The mechanisms involved are poorly understood, and our ability to assess the seismic hazard associated with geothermal energy or unconventional hydrocarbon production remains limited. We directly measure fault slip and seismicity induced by fluid injection into a natural fault. We observe highly dilatant and slow [~4 micrometers per second (μm/s)] aseismic slip associated with a 20-fold increase of permeability, which transitions to faster slip (~10 μm/s) associated with reduced dilatancy and micro-earthquakes. Most aseismic slip occurs within the fluid-pressurized zone and obeys a rate-strengthening friction law with v0 = 0.1 μm/s. Fluid injection primarily triggers aseismic slip in this experiment, with micro-earthquakes being an indirect effect mediated by aseismic creep.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Materials and Methods
Figs. S1 to S6
Database S1
Resources
References and Notes
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Science
Volume 348 | Issue 6240
12 June 2015
12 June 2015
Copyright
Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 3 March 2015
Accepted: 9 May 2015
Published in print: 12 June 2015
Acknowledgments
The experimental work was funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) Captage de CO2 through the HPPP-CO2 project and by PACA through the PETRO-PRO project. The rate-and-state fault models for this study were supported by the French Academy of Sciences, the California Institute of Technology Tectonics Observatory, and the ANR HYDROSEIS under contract ANR-13-JS06-0004-01. We thank the SITES S.A.S. engineers H. Caron, C. Micollier, R. Blin, and H. Lançon, and the Petrometalic S.A. engineer J. B. Janovczyk, who jointly developed and operated the probe that enabled this experiment. We also thank the Laboratoire Souterrain à Bas Bruit (LSBB) engineers’ team for their technical support during the installation of the experiment in one of the LSBB boreholes (www.lsbb.eu). Experimental data are available in the supplementary materials.
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