Local fluid pressure perturbations inside faults matter in unexpectedly large injection-triggered earthquakes

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of local fluid pressure variations within faults under undrained conditions in triggering unexpectedly large earthquakes during fluid injection, expanding on prior work that assumed uniform pressure distributions.

Contribution

It introduces additional datasets and explanations highlighting the role of local fluid pressure perturbations in fault slip behavior, challenging previous assumptions of uniform pressure.

Findings

Local fluid pressure perturbations can significantly influence fault slip.

Undrained conditions lead to non-uniform pressure distributions affecting earthquake size.

Additional data support the impact of local pressure variations on seismic events.

Abstract

Anticipating the maximum magnitude of injection-triggered earthquakes is highly valuable for the safe and efficient exploitation of geoenergies. The recent work by Li et al.(2021) reached the conclusion that unexpectedly large injection-triggered earthquakes are primarily caused by large pre-existing critical shear stresses on seismogenic faults. Also of great interest is the proposal of the ratio of fault slip to dilation as an index to anticipate the fault rupture energetics. However, their fluid injection experiments were conducted under fully drained conditions, where the fluid pressure distribution on the fault plane is always uniform. As already pointed out by the authors, local fluid pressure perturbations inside faults under locally undrained conditions also have the potential to cause unexpectedly large seismic events. Here we add more datasets and possible explanations for this viewpoint, which has not been explored in such detail by Li et al.(2021).