Source duration of stress and water-pressure induced seismicity derived from experimental analysis of P wave pulse width in granite

Pulse widths of P waves in granite, measured in the laboratory, were analyzed to investigate source durations of rupture processes for water-pressure induced and stress-induced microseismicity. Much evidence suggests that fluids in the subsurface are intimately linked to faulting processes. Studies of seismicity induced by water injection are thus important for understanding the trigger mechanisms of earthquakes as well as for engineering applications such as hydraulic fracturing of rocks at depth for petroleum extraction. Determining the cause of seismic events is very important in seismology and engineering; however, water-pressure induced seismic events are difficult to distinguish from those induced by purely tectonic stress. To investigate this problem, we analyzed the waveforms of acoustic emissions (AEs) produced in the laboratory by both water-pressure induced and stress-induced microseismicity. We used a cylinder (50 mm in diameter and 100 mm in length) of medium-grained granite. We applied a differential stress of about 70% of fracture strength, to the rock sample under 40 MPa confining pressure and held it constant throughout the experiment. When the primary creep stage and acoustic emissions (AEs) caused by the initial loading had ceased, we injected distilled water into the bottom end of the sample at a constant pressure of 17 MPa until macroscopic fracture occurred. We analysed AE waveforms produced by stress-induced AEs which occurred before the water-injection and by water-pressure induced AEs which occurred after the water-injection. Pulse widths were measured from the waveform traces plotted from the digital data. To investigate the source duration of the rupture process, we estimated the pulse width at the source and normalized by event magnitude to obtain a scaled pulse width at the source. After the effects of event size and hypocentral distance were removed from observed pulse widths, the ratio of the scaled source durations of water-pressure induced and stress-induced microseismicity was 0.52. The difference in the scaled source durations between water-pressure and stress induced microseismicity suggests that water-pressure induced microseismicity involves a greater rupture velocity or a more equidimensional fault geometry than stress-induced microseismicity. These results suggest that pulse-width analysis of P waveforms can be used to distinguish water-pressure induced events from those induced by regional stress and to characterize the faulting process.