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Discovery of a new type of ‘fracking’ earthquake

 


Researchers have discovered a hybrid type of earthquake by studying the seismic signals generated by… [+] Underground fluid injection.

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According to a press release from Ruhr-Universität-Bochum, a Canadian-German research team has documented a new type of earthquake in an injection field in British Columbia, Canada. Unlike traditional earthquakes of the same size, they are slower and last longer. The events are a new type of induced earthquake that resulted from hydraulic fracturing (more commonly known as “fracking”), a method used in western Canada to extract oil and gas.

With a network of eight seismic monitoring stations surrounding an injection well a few kilometers away, researchers from the Geological Survey of Canada, Ruhr-Universität Bochum and McGill University have recorded seismic data for nearly 350 earthquakes. Their findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

About ten percent of existing earthquakes have been shown to exhibit unique features indicating that they rupture more slowly, similar to what was previously observed mainly in volcanic regions, when molten rock rushes upward.

So far, researchers have explained the occurrence of earthquakes in hydraulic fracturing by two processes.

The first says that the fluid being pumped into the rock generates a pressure increase large enough to generate a new network of fractures in the subsurface rock near the well. As a result, the increase in pressure can be large enough to remove existing faults and trigger an earthquake, releasing energy accumulated by tectonic stress.

According to the second process, the increase in fluid pressure from the injection in the subsurface also causes elastic stress changes on the surrounding rocks which can travel over longer distances. If stress changes occur in rocks where there are faults, they can also lead to changes that cause the fault to slide and cause an earthquake.

More recently, numerical models and laboratory analyzes have predicted an operation on faults near injection wells that have been observed elsewhere on tectonic faults. The process, called seismic slip, begins as a slow slip that releases no seismic energy. Slow slip can also change stress on nearby faults causing them to slide quickly and cause an earthquake.

The lack of seismic energy from seismic slip and the size of the faults involved makes them difficult to observe in nature. Therefore researchers have not yet been able to document large-scale seismic slippage with any association with induced earthquakes. The work of the current study provides indirect evidence for seismic loading, and the transition from seismic to seismic slip.

The German-Canadian research team interprets the recently discovered slow seismicity as an intermediate form of conventional seismicity and seismic slip – and thus as indirect evidence that seismic slip can also occur near wells. So the researchers named the events Hybrid Frequency Wave (EHW) earthquakes.

“We hypothesized that induced earthquakes behave like most other earthquakes and have roughly the same rupture velocity of two to three kilometers per second,” explains Rebecca Harrington. But this does not always appear to be the case. Whereas the shaking from a traditional 1.5-magnitude earthquake (typically, earthquakes of less than 2 degrees not felt by people, but recorded by seismic stations) in the researchers’ data set wore off after about seven seconds, an EHW earthquake of the same magnitude continued to vibrate for more of ten seconds.

This finding could help reduce damage from tremors caused by fracking.

“If we understand at what point subsurface fracturing is interacting with movements that do not result in an earthquake and therefore cause no damage to the surface, then it is best to use this information to adjust the injection procedure accordingly,” described Rebecca Harrington, Head of Hydrogeomechanics Group at Ruhr-Ruhr. Universität-Bochum, an implication of the study.

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Sources

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2/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2021/12/06/new-type-of-earthquake-triggered-by-fracking-discovered/

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