A process-based approach to understanding and managing triggered seismicity

Bradford H Hager; James Dieterich; Cliff Frohlich; Ruben Juanes; Stefano Mantica; John H Shaw; Francesca Bottazzi; Federica Caresani; David Castineira; Alberto Cominelli; Marco Meda; Lorenzo Osculati; Stefania Petroselli; Andreas Plesch

doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03668-z

A process-based approach to understanding and managing triggered seismicity

Nature. 2021 Jul;595(7869):684-689. doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-03668-z. Epub 2021 Jul 28.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Earth Resources Laboratory, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. bhhager@mit.edu.
² Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA.
³ Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
⁴ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁵ Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁶ Development, Operations and Technology, and Exploration, Eni, Milan, Italy.
⁷ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

PMID: 34321668
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03668-z

Abstract

There is growing concern about seismicity triggered by human activities, whereby small increases in stress bring tectonically loaded faults to failure. Examples of such activities include mining, impoundment of water, stimulation of geothermal fields, extraction of hydrocarbons and water, and the injection of water, CO₂ and methane into subsurface reservoirs¹. In the absence of sufficient information to understand and control the processes that trigger earthquakes, authorities have set up empirical regulatory monitoring-based frameworks with varying degrees of success^2,3. Field experiments in the early 1970s at the Rangely, Colorado (USA) oil field⁴ suggested that seismicity might be turned on or off by cycling subsurface fluid pressure above or below a threshold. Here we report the development, testing and implementation of a multidisciplinary methodology for managing triggered seismicity using comprehensive and detailed information about the subsurface to calibrate geomechanical and earthquake source physics models. We then validate these models by comparing their predictions to subsequent observations made after calibration. We use our approach in the Val d'Agri oil field in seismically active southern Italy, demonstrating the successful management of triggered seismicity using a process-based method applied to a producing hydrocarbon field. Applying our approach elsewhere could help to manage and mitigate triggered seismicity.