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Tremor and Slow Slip in Sedimentary Basins

Description: 

The Delaware basin in Texas is an exemplary laboratory for understanding seismicity within sedimentary basins. Though the seismicity has been well studied and can be located precisely, satellite data suggests that energy is also being released aseismically. Dozens of lineaments have been mapped in the Delaware basin that can be linked to injection and production activities. Complex seismic signals that resemble tremor normally found in subduction zones have also been found. Tremor signals can be identified and distinguished from earthquakes with a machine-learning approach, initially trained on megathrust tremor in Cascadia, using a convolution network followed by a long-short-term memory layer. The ML approach allows for the ternary identification (tremor, earthquake, noise) to function at signal-to-noise ratios as low as 0 dB. For clean tremor signals, a cross-correlation and beamforming approach is used to detect and locate some of these seismic signals and explore the possibility that they could be an example of tremor within a sedimentary basin. Finally, there are also low-frequency anomalies, similar to slow slip, that appear to relate to injection activities within the basin. Though further work is needed to understand these observations, we present a framework for how basement-rooted faults that emerge in the basin can sustain seismicity, aseismic slip, and other complex signals.

Session: From Drilling to Ground Shaking: Mechanisms, Monitoring and Mitigation of Induced Earthquakes - I

Type: Oral

Date: 4/17/2026

Presentation Time: 09:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Nadine Ushakov

Student Presenter: No

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