Unravelling Deformation and Seismicity in Hot Dry Geothermal Reservoirs: New Insights from Real-Time Full-Field Displacement Laboratory Monitoring
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Geothermal energy is a promising carbon-free and renewable resource, yet its development is often constrained by geohazards such as induced seismicity and surface subsidence. These risks threaten project sustainability and pose safety concerns for nearby communities. Multiple coupled processes, including reservoir pressure changes, thermal contraction, and fault slip, are thought to drive these hazards, but disentangling their individual contributions across space and time remains a major challenge in large, actively managed systems. In this study, we present a controlled laboratory experiment in which a granitic fault was subjected to mechanical and thermal loading followed by cool-water injection. Fault slip and off-fault cracking were monitored in real time using digital image correlation (DIC). Complementary two-dimensional finite–discrete element method thermomechanical simulations (FDEM-TM) were conducted to isolate the role of cooling on deformation. Results show that rapid fault pressurization acted as a dynamic driver of seismic slip, whereas low-pressure injection-induced cooling promoted aseismic slip. Both processes contributed to asperity breakage and dilation, enhancing fault permeability, while cooling also induced off-fault tensile cracking that further improved fluid flow pathways. These findings underscore the complex interplay between thermal and hydraulic effects in controlling fault mechanics and permeability evolution. The results provide new insights into geothermal reservoir stimulation and highlight the implications of intermittent operations, such as cyclic fluid injection, for reservoir management and geohazard mitigation in hot dry rock geothermal settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".