Do shallow injection wells contribute to the triggering of the 2020 M5.0 Mentone earthquake in the Delaware Basin, Texas?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The M5.0 earthquake that occurred in March 2020 near the town of Mentone in the Delaware Basin, Texas, is one of the largest induced earthquakes recorded in the central US. A former study shows that the triggering of this event can be attributed to the nearby deep injection. Interestingly, the shallow injection wells in this region have an injection volume five times larger than that of deep injection wells. In this study, we investigate the role of these shallow injection wells in the triggering of the M5.0 event despite their farther distance from the mainshock. By performing focal mechanism inversion and earthquake relocation, we determine the precise orientation of the south-facing normal fault plane where the mainshock occurred, followed by fully coupled poroelastic stress modeling of the change of Coulomb Failure Stress (ΔCFS) on the fitted fault plane due to the shallow injection in the region. Results show that shallow wells may cause up to 30 kPa of ΔCFS near the mainshock location, dominated by positive poroelastic stress change. Such perturbation surpasses the general triggering threshold of faults that are well aligned with the local stress field and suggests a nonnegligible role of these shallow injection in the triggering of the mainshock. Our study also highlights the effect of rock properties of injection layers on the magnitude and spatial extent of pore pressure and stress perturbations, supporting the importance of detailed geomechanical evaluation of the reservoir when developing relevant operational and safety policies.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".