Thermally stimulated “runaway” downhole flow in a superhydrostatic ocean crustal borehole: Observations, simulations, and inferences regarding crustal permeability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An array of boreholes, drilled through a regionally continuous hydrologically confining layer of sediments into extrusive igneous basement rocks of the Juan de Fuca Ridge eastern flank, has been instrumented with CORK hydrologic observatories for long‐term monitoring and fluid sampling. Omission of seals between nested casing strings reaching into basement at one site created a low‐resistance connection between basement and the overlying water column, and despite the natural superhydrostatic state of basement water at that location, a “runaway” condition of cold seawater downhole flow into the crust was established, which persisted for more than 4 years. The existence of this condition, along with perturbations generated by it and by initial drilling operations observed at a properly sealed hole 2.4 km away, have been used with analytic and finite element model solutions to constrain formation permeability. The minimum threshold permeability allowing stable downhole flow is roughly 4 × 10−13 m2. A value of permeability similar to this (3–4 × 10−13 m2) is estimated on the basis of the elapsed time for initial perturbations to propagate between the sites (∼2.5 days). The amplitude of the long‐term flow perturbation observed at the sealed site (roughly 1.7 kPa) is smaller than that predicted by modeling (5–10 kPa). Models for flow in an anisotropically permeable layer show that this could be the consequence of low vertical permeability (e.g., arising from massive volcanic or sediment interlayering) or high permeability in the direction of the tectonic fabric generated at the ridge axis. Disagreement between the permeabilities estimated here with previous large‐scale estimates appropriate for the cross‐strike direction (the primary direction between the borehole sites) (10−10–10−9 m2) is difficult to reconcile; it is possible that the holes are poorly connected to zones of high permeability that facilitate the large lateral fluid and heat fluxes previously inferred at this young crustal site.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".