Evolutionary characteristics of families of repeated earthquakes in southern Kansas, Central United States, induced by wastewater disposal
Abstract
The timing of events in seismic sequences can provide insights into the physical processes controlling fault slip. In southern Kansas, the rate of earthquakes rose rapidly starting in 2013 following expansion of energy production into the area, demanding the disposal of large volumes of wastewater into deep wells. Seismicity catalogs that are complete to low magnitudes may help to elucidate the physical processes that induce earthquakes near wastewater disposal. We develop a catalog of over 130,000 earthquakes recorded in southern Kansas from mid-March 2014 through December 2017 by applying a matched filter algorithm to an original catalog of 5,831 template earthquakes. Detections have nearly identical waveforms to template events and represent slip on nearly co-located sections of a fault. We select template events with at least 100 associated detections and examine the characteristics of these prolific families of earthquakes. We find that families located within 10 km of areas where significant volumes of fluids are injected tend to occur at a steady rate, have lower median magnitudes, and remain active over longer durations compared to families at greater distances from wells. We conclude that increasing pore fluid pressures from nearby disposal of large volumes of wastewater is the primary driver of these long duration episodes close to wells, with earthquake-earthquake interactions dominating sequence evolutionary behavior at greater distance from the wells.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.S22A..02C
- Keywords:
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- 7209 Earthquake dynamics;
- SEISMOLOGYDE: 7223 Earthquake interaction;
- forecasting;
- and prediction;
- SEISMOLOGYDE: 7230 Seismicity and tectonics;
- SEISMOLOGYDE: 8168 Stresses: general;
- TECTONOPHYSICS