Collaborative Research: Developing a Methodology for Imaging Stress Transients at Seismogenic Depth: Data Analysis and Interpretation

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0453638SilverThe time-varying stress state of fault systems is perhaps the single most important property controlling the sequencing and nucleation of seismic events. The deployment of surface geodetic instrumentation, as part of Earthscope, will provide us with important constraints on this stress field, through comprehensive observations of the time-varying surface strain field. As a way of augmenting these constraints, the PIs are presently developing an active-source methodology based on the stress dependence of seismic velocity to measure subsurface stress transients. Numerous laboratory studies over several decades have shown that the elastic properties (seismic velocity, attenuation, anisotropy) of crustal rocks clearly exhibit stress dependence. Such dependence is attributed to the opening/closing of microcracks due to changes in the stress normal to the crack surface. Thus stress changes can, in principle, be detected by exploiting the stress sensitivity of the elastic properties of the seismogenic crust. For decades there have been efforts to exploit this stress dependence, although this goal has thus far been elusive. There are two primary reasons for this: 1) lack of sufficient time-delay precision necessary to detect small changes in stress, and 2) the difficulty in establishing a reliable calibration between stress and the seismic properties of the medium. These two problems are coupled because the best sources of calibration are the solid-earth tides and barometric pressure, both of which produce weak stress perturbations of order 102-103 Pa. Detecting these sources requires measurement of fractional velocity changes on the order of 10-5-10-6, based on laboratory experiments. The PIs have been conducting a series of cross-hole active-source experiments at different scales: 3 m spacing at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) facility, 30 m spacing at the LBNL Richmond Field Station (RFS), and, 300 m spacing at 2 km depth, shooting from SAFOD Pilot Hole at Parkfield to sensors at the SAFOD main hole. Thus far they have completed work at the first site, have made several measurements at the RFS, and are completing the final test at RFS. Preliminary analyses of the two test datasets suggest that it is possible to reach the required delay time precision of order 10-6, and that barometric pressure and tidally-induced changes in travel time can be observed. With the final datasets from RFS and Parkfield, the PIs are planning to conduct the following analysis together with numerical modeling: (1) delay time estimates of the P wave and its coda; (2) delay time estimates of the S wave and its coda; (3) amplitude measurements for both P and S wave; (4) S-wave splitting measurements; (5) scattered-field imaging using P- and S-wave coda. Numerical modeling includes: 1) determining the characteristics of the corresponding poroelastic medium and its response to known stresses, and 2) calculating the corresponding seismic properties of such a medium. The most promising properties are then to be used to develop a quantitative stress calibration, established through the choice of an appropriate poroelastic medium that accounts for both the observed stress sensitivity and seismic properties (including scattering).