The non-negligible contribution of shallow injection wells on the triggering of the Mw 5.0 Mentone earthquake via coupled poroelastic stress perturbations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Occurred in the Delaware Basin, western Texas, near the town of Mentone, the Mw 5.0 Mentone earthquake is one of the largest induced earthquakes in the central US. Within 25 km of the epicenter, there are a few deep injection wells to the northwest injecting in the high permeable limestone layer at about 22 km averagely, as well as a lot of shallow wells injecting in the upper high permeable sandstone layer at around 18 km averagely. Between the shallow sandstone and deep limestone layers is a thick shale layer with low permeability, which excludes the possibility of downward percolation of the injected fluid in the shallow injection layer. However, the cumulative injection volume of shallow injection wells is about five times as much as that of deep injection wells. Motivated by this, we investigate whether the shallow injection wells may play a role in triggering the Mw 5.0 Mentone earthquake through the injection-induced coupled poroelastic stress perturbations. We first perform focal mechanism inversion and earthquake relocation with the Cut and Paste (CAP) and hypoDD methods, respectively, to constrain the fault plane on which the Mw 5.0 event occurred. A south-facing fault plane with strike/dip of 81o/52o is successfully fitted. We then calculate the change of the Coulomb failure stress (ΔCFS) caused by the shallow injection wells at the mainshock location based on the linear fully coupled poroelastic stress model. The calculated ΔCFS of shallow injection wells is approximately 20 kPa and it is mostly contributed by the change in coupled poroelastic stress. Based on findings from other studies, this value of ΔCFS is sufficient in reactivating faults that are well aligned with the local stress field. Since we only account for about half of the total injection volume from the shallow wells in the calculation, we also hypothesize that the actual perturbations caused by shallow injection wells via the coupled poroelastic stress change would be more prominent. Our result reveals the vital role of injection-induced coupled poroelastic stress in triggering seismicity, especially in low permeable geologic settings.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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".