Citizen Seismology Provides Insights into Ground Motions and Hazard from Injection-Induced Earthquakes

Abstract:

The US Geological Survey "Did You Feel It?" (DYFI) system is a highly successful example of citizen seismology. Users around the world now routinely report felt earthquakes via the Web; this information is used to determine Community Decimal Intensity values. These data can be enormously valuable for helping address a key issue that has arisen recently: quantifying the shaking/hazard associated with injection-induced earthquakes. I consider the shaking from 11 moderate (Mw3.9-5.7) earthquakes in the central and eastern United States that are believed to be induced by fluid injection. The distance decay of intensities for all events is consistent with that observed for regional tectonic earthquakes, but for all of the events intensities are lower than values predicted from an intensity prediction equation derived using data from tectonic events. I introduce an effective intensity magnitude, M_IE, defined as the magnitude that on average would generate a given intensity distribution. For all 11 events, M_IE is lower than the event magnitude by 0.4-1.3 units, with an average difference of 0.8 units. This suggests that stress drops of injection-induced earthquakes are lower than tectonic earthquakes by a factor of 2-10. However, relatively limited data suggest that intensities for epicentral distances less than 10 km are more commensurate with expectations for the event magnitude, which can be explained by the shallow focal depth of the events. The results suggest that damage from injection-induced earthquakes will be especially concentrated in the immediate epicentral region. These results further suggest a potential new discriminant for the identification of induced events. For ecample, while systematic analysis of California earthquakes remains to be done, DYFI data from the 2014 Mw5.1 La Habra, California, earthquake reveal no evidence for unusually low intensities, adding to a growing volume of evidence that this was a natural tectonic event.