Long-term Fluid Injection Can Expedite Fault Development: Riedel Shear Structures Illuminated by Induced Earthquakes in Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Riedel shear structures (RSS) are often observed in the embryonic stage of strike-slip fault development. Typical RSS often involve a set of conjugated fault segments that interact with each other prior to the growth of a through-going fault, that is, the principal deformation zone (PDZ), sub-structures R, R’ and P. Ideally, sub-structures R and P should be symmetric to the PDZ while structures R and R′ are conjugated to each other. It is a critical concept linking the geomechanical behavior of individual earthquakes to structural geology at both local and regional scales. The depiction of RSS can help understand the geomechanical behavior of individual earthquakes. In the meantime, the influence of long-term fluid injections on the developing process of RSS, as manifested by the common occurrences of injection-induced earthquakes, has been rarely addressed. Here we document a clear case in western Canada where the development of a local RSS system is expedited by 25 years of wastewater injection. RSS are manifested by an earthquake sequence consisting of 187 events (ML ranging 1.3–3.9) between 2018/01/01 and 2021/07/15 in an area without any previous seismic history. Focal mechanisms of these events exhibit various faulting types with the majority (87%) being compatible with the background stress regime. The orientation of derived nodal planes and six fault segments depicted from the refined earthquake distribution collectively define the overall geometrical characteristics of RSS, which consists of four primary strike-slip structures striking 19º (R’), 79º (R), 94º (PDZ) and 109º (P), respectively. Mohr-Coulomb failure analysis further suggests a cumulative stress perturbation of up to 10.0 MPa, probably bringing the local structures very close to the critically stressed state. Overall, our observations suggest that long-term fluid injection can expedite the development of local fault systems. Consequently, it is probably necessary to consider the full dimension of the local/regional RSS rather than the size of individual events in the assessment of the overall injection-induced seismic hazard.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".