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Room: Exhibit Hall

Date: 4/15/2025

Session Time: 8:00 AM to 5:45 PM (local time)

Mechanistic Insights into Fluid-induced Earthquakes from the Laboratory to the Field

Fluid-induced earthquakes, including those that are triggered, occur both naturally and anthropogenically and are fundamentally connected to fluid-fault and/or fluid-fracture mechanical interactions. Fluid-induced seismicity has become a significant phenomenon and concern during natural fluid migration or human-made fluid injection and extraction activities, such as hydraulic flows, slab dehydration, hydrocarbon or hydrogen production, wastewater and CO₂ injection, and geothermal production. The physical mechanisms driving the seismicity have been extensively studied and include pore-pressure diffusion, poroelastic stress changes, fluid-driven aseismic slip, and shear stress transfer. However, understanding these mechanisms is challenging due to their context-specific nature and because there is a lack of high-quality geophysical measurements that quantify subsurface and fault zone properties and in-situ stress evolutions. This complexity necessitates comprehensive studies that explore the effects of heterogeneous fault or fracture properties, varying host materials, and environmental conditions on the generation and evolution of triggered or induced seismicity. Such research will help clarify the intricate physical processes underlying the complex spatiotemporal distribution and behavior of the seismicity. Moreover, these insights will enhance the characterization and mitigation of seismic hazards.

We invite submissions of studies, ranging from laboratory experiments to field observations, that offer new perspectives on the underlying physics of fluid-fault and/or fluid-fracture interactions. We welcome contributions from national labs, academics, regulators and industry members, focusing on : 1) studies using laboratory experiments and numerical simulations to explore the physical processes that control fluid-induced seismicity, and 2) studies of spatiotemporal behavior of fluid-induced seismicity across various natural scales and settings, particularly those that offer new insights into the mechanisms driving fluid-induced seismicity in the field.

Conveners

David Chas Bolton, University of Texas at Austin (chasbolton19@gmail.com)
Xiaowei Chen, Texas A&M University (xiaowei.chen@exchange.tamu.edu)
Thomas H. Goebel, University of Memphis (thgoebel@memphis.edu)
Congcong Yuan, Cornell University (cy547@cornell.edu)

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