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Was the Mw 7.5 1952 Kern County, California, earthquake induced (or triggered)?

ABSTRACT: Several recent studies have presented evidence that significant induced earthquakes occurred in a number of oil-producing regions during the early and mid-twentieth century related to either production or wastewater injection. We consider whether the 21 July 1952 Mw 7.5 Kern County earthquake might have been induced by production in the Wheeler Ridge oil field. The mainshock, which was not preceded by any significant foreshocks, occurred 98 days after the initial production of oil in Eocene strata at depths reaching 3 km, within ~1 km of the White Wolf fault (WWF). Based on this spatial and temporal proximity, we explore a potential causal relationship between the earthquake and oil production. While production would have normally be expected to have reduced pore pressure, inhibiting failure on the WWF, we present an analytical model based on industry stratigraphic data and best estimates of parameters whereby an impermeable splay fault adjacent to the main WWF could plausibly have blocked direct pore pressure effects, allowing the poroelastic stress change associated with production to destabilize the WWF, promoting initial failure. This proof-of-concept model can also account for the 98-day delay between the onset of production and the earthquake. While the earthquake clearly released stored tectonic stress, any initial perturbation on or near a major fault system can trigger a larger rupture. Our proposed mechanism provides an explanation for why significant earthquakes are not commonly induced by production in proximity to major faults.

SUBMITTER: Hough SE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5693966 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:The Mw7.5 Palu-Donggala earthquake occurred on 28 September 2018 and caused significant damage in Palu City and the surrounding Central Sulawesi region of Indonesia. The earthquake initiated a series of catastrophic landslides (classified as flowslides) [1,2], collapsed buildings, and generated tsunami waves that impacted Palu Bay's coast. The earthquake claimed over 4000 lives, making it the deadliest natural disaster of 2018. We performed a post-earthquake field reconnaissance and collected perishable data at the sites of five significant flowslides (named for the communities where they occurred: Balaroa, Petobo, Lolu Village, Jono Oge, and Sibalaya), as well as at other damage locations in the mesoseismal region. Our field team consisted of five U.S.-based members, who were sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) organization [3], in collaboration with geologists, geotechnical engineers, and other researchers from Indonesia's Center for Earthquake Studies (PusGen) and the Indonesian Society of Geotechnical Engineers (HATTI) [this international team is collectively referred to as the Palu Earthquake ";GEER" team]. The GEER team arrived at Palu City on 13 November 2018 and conducted five days of extensive fieldwork using instrumentation from the Natural Hazards Reconnaissance Facility (known as the "RAPID") [4,5], including mobile data collection software, digital imaging systems, high-resolution Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) antennas, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or ";drones"). The resulting dataset includes over 2000 geotagged photographs, UAV images, ground coordinates, and other field measurements and observations, as well as associated post-processed geospatial data products (point clouds, digital surface models, orthomosaic images). Additionally, we used remote sensing data (i.e., pre- and post-event satellite imagery) to generate displacement vectors for over 1200 structures affected by the flowslides. The complete reconnaissance dataset is openly available on DesignSafe [6]. The data collected by the field team and subsequent mapping efforts, which document the morphology and patterns of movements of the flowslides, may be used by researchers studying liquefaction-induced flowslides. In addition, the displacement mapping provides a unique dataset for researchers who are calibrating and verifying simulation models of landslide displacements, or who are seeking a validation dataset for image correlation analysis (including machine learning routines). This dataset is associated with original research presented in ";East Palu Valley Flowslides Induced by the 2018 MW 7.5 Palu-Donggala Earthquake" [1] and also is the basis of research presented by Gallant et al. [2].

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Was the Mw 7.5 1952 Kern County, California, earthquake induced (or triggered)?

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