Carbon storage rocks may lubricate San Andreas

Did you know that there is a mineral that may prevent catastrophic earthquakes and sequester carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere? A new study explores this link.

Written by Melissa Scroggs, Ph.D., VolcanoDoc

Citation: Scruggs, M., 2022, Carbon Storage Rocks May Lubricate San Andreas, Temblor, http://doi.org/10.32858/temblor.280

Visible from space, the San Andreas Fault is one of the largest fault zones on Earth. Since 1906, large, destructive earthquakes have made it one of the world’s most famous faults. However, some sections of San Andreas are strangely quiet. There, slipping along faults usually occurs without noticeable jerks.

A new study shows how chemical reactions taking place deep in the fault zone create the minerals needed to induce movement without major earthquakes. These same reactions store carbon dioxide in their mineral products, and scientists have proposed them as a way to remove large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Small earthquakes move plates

Typically, an earthquake occurs because adjacent pieces of land stumble as they slide over each other along faults, causing pressure to build up. Earth’s tectonic plates are always in motion. As the plates continue to shift, pressure increases along these stumbling points. When these locked portions of the fault eventually break, the slip releases some stress in the form of an earthquake.

But, some faults—including the San Andreas, Calaveras, and Hayward faults in California—can release this pressure without causing catastrophic earthquakes. In certain places, these faults creep in at a relatively steady pace by producing frequent small earthquakes that limit the faults’ abilities to create enough stress to cause large earthquakes, says Diane Moore, a USGS research geologist who studies San Andreas.

Scientists have been watching creeping along these faults since the 1960s. Early mechanisms to explain this phenomenon have suggested causing deeper earthquakes, lubrication of a fault with slippery rocks such as serpentinite (a rock formed by altering the Earth’s mantle), differences in fault geometry and higher fluid pore pressures in fault deposits.

There are a number of faults that make up the San Andreas system in central and northern California. In this map, fault segments that infiltrate non-seismically at least 20% of the time are shown in yellow. The black star indicates the location of the San Andreas Fault Observatory in the Depth Project, just north of going from where the fault was locked to where it crawls. Credit: modified from Moore et al. (2018), Public Domain.

Interesting discovery

Decades later, scientists still struggle to understand why creep occurs along certain faults, but slippery rocks seem to play a major role.

The link between talc (a soft metal sometimes found in baby powder) and creep was first established in 2007, Moore says, when scientists from a drilling project designed to explore a creeping portion of the San Andreas Fault found that talc and serpentine crossed the fault about three kilometers below the surface.

SAFOD drilled through the San Andreas Fault, recovering rocks bearing serpentine, saponite, and talc — soft minerals that may enhance seismic creep along the fault. Credit: USGS, Public Domain.

Earth’s cover consists mostly of olivine, a magnesium-rich mineral that is unstable at the surface and easily turns serpentine, and as a marine geologist studying mantle rock change, Freder Klein of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution says he was examining maps of serpentinite along the California coast when he noticed Magnesite deposits (a mineral similar to calcite that contains magnesium rather than calcium) were often located near parts of faults that do not produce major earthquakes.

When serpentinite is exposed to liquids rich in carbon dioxide, a chemical reaction turns the greasy green rock into soapstone – a mixture of magnesite and talc. Constant exposure to carbon dioxide-rich liquids changes soapstone into a rock made of additional quartz and magnesite. Oddly enough, Klein said, these mineral deposits and carbon dioxide-rich spring sites “all line up along the fault zones.” But when Klein and his colleagues went to collect surface samples from the San Andreas Fault, they found magnesite and quartz, but no talc. Klein and colleagues conclude that because magnesite and quartz are present on the fault surface, lost talc should form at greater depths in the fault zone, where it cannot be seen.

Exposing altered mantle rocks to carbon dioxide-rich liquids turns serpentine into soapstone, a rock made of talc and magnesite. Credit: Jan Hilbrandt via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Understanding metallic behavior using computer models

Because Klein and his colleagues had no way of sampling rocks so deeply along the fault, they used models of how the minerals behave under different conditions inside the Earth. The model results showed that talc could indeed be produced by altering the carbon dioxide-rich liquid of mantle rocks at the same pressures and temperatures that rocks in the fault zone would be exposed to.

However, mantle rocks can be converted to talc in other ways, such as shearing within the fault zone or alteration caused by silica-rich fluids, Moore says. Although scientists cannot determine exactly why creep occurs, this study indicates that talc formation deep in fault zones could be necessary to facilitate creep. To reduce the friction caused by parts of the Earth’s surface moving with one another, the rocks along these fault boundaries must be relatively slippery. Klein says talc has “mechanical properties that allow it to deform … without causing earthquakes.”

Storing carbon dioxide while preventing major earthquakes

The use of geochemical reactions in mantle rocks as a means of carbon storage was first proposed in the early 1990s. Changing mantle rocks to soapstone could be a natural way to store carbon dioxide in rocks and minerals, and scientists have suggested speeding up this chemical reaction to remove carbon from Earth’s atmosphere and help reduce the effects of climate change. Accelerating this process in the slow-spreading mid-ocean fringes where mantle rocks at Earth’s surface can be exposed, Klein says, might naturally reduce the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in our oceans.

“Communities are getting desperate…people are taking climate change more seriously and are willing to consider exploring potential opportunities to solve the problem,” says Klein, and the carbonation of mantle rocks appears to be a promising method for industrial-scale carbon sequestration.

references

Bakun, W. H., Stewart, R. M., Bufe, C. G., & Marks, S. M. (1980) The effect of earthquakes on the failure of a section of the San Andreas fault. Bulletin of the American Seismological Society. https://doi.org/10.1785/BSSA0700010185

Columbia School of Climate. (2020). Carbon sequestration: The mineral carbonation in peridotite for carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS). https://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/gpg/projects/carbon-sequestration

Goff, F., and Lackner, KS (1998) Sequestration of carbon dioxide using supermafic rocks. AAPG Division of Journal of Environmental Geosciences. https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/eg/article-abstract/5/3/89/61334/Carbon-dioxide-sequestering-using-ultramafic-rocks

Klein, F., Goldsby, D. L., & Andreani, M. (2022) Carbonation of serpentinite in California creeping faults. Geophysical Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL099185

Lienkaemper, JJ, McFarland, FS, Simpson, RW, Bilham, RG, Ponce, DA, Boatwright, JJ, & Caskey, SJ (2012) Hayward Fault’s long-term creep rates: evidence for controls on the magnitude and frequency of large earthquakes. Bulletin of the American Seismological Society. https://doi.org/10.1785/0120110033

Maurer, J., & Johnson, K. (2014) Coupling fault and seismic potential in the creeping section of the central San Andreas fault. Journal of Geophysical Research, Solid Earth. https://doi.org/10.1002/2013JB010741

Moore, DE, McLaughlin, RJ, & Lienkaemper, JJ (2018), Serpentinite-rich gouge in a creeping segment of the Bartlett Springs fault, Northern California: comparison with SAFOD and implications for seismic hazards. Tectonics. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018TC005307

Moore, DE, & Rymer, MJ (2007) The serpentinite talc bearing and creeping section of the San Andreas Fault. temper nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06064

Reinen, LA, Weeks, JD, & Tullis, TE (1991) Frictional behavior of serpentinite: implications for seismic creep on shallow crustal faults. Geophysical Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1029/91GL02367

Scholz, CH, Wyss, M., & Smith, SW (1969) Seismic and seismic slip on the San Andreas Fault. Journal of Geophysical Research. https://doi.org/10.1029/JB074i008p02049

Sieh, K.E., & Williams, PL (1990) The behavior of the southernmost San Andreas fault during the past 300 years. Journal of Geophysical Research, Solid Earth. https://doi.org/10.1029/JB095iB05p06629

in-depth reading

California Seismic Authority. (2020). What is the San Andreas Fault? https://www.earthquakeauthority.com/Blog/2020/San-Andreas-Fault-Line-Map

United States Geological Survey. (second abbreviation). Crawl proof of the active error. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/creep-evidence-active-faulting

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