Tuesday, August 23, 2016

The Oklahoma Earthquake Zone Strain Field



You can think of the OK zone as an excavation in a highly stressed rock.  It has an effect several times its diameter.  If you wanted to do actual work (which I never do), you can plot the contours of stress disturbance, using discrete finite element results as a guide.  This is what we did at the height of Rock Mechanics before that all went into the privy.

Right now, the shattered zone of New Madrid is reacting.  Sometimes it really pops.  Now we have the fractured zones of Colorado.  I'm sure they stopped injecting at these spots.  If we could get the fault mechanisms of all these surrounding earthquakes, they would make a nice pattern.  Not going to happen.  This whole thing is tied up in politics.


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