Sensing Cracks in the Earth Using Multiple Scattering and Nonlinear Elasticity

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Cracks are increasingly important to our understanding of Earth resources and structures. They hold most of the unconventional oil and gas reserves, are important for geothermal energy, and play a role in conventional oil and gas production, volcanic eruptions and perhaps even earthquakes. In wavefields, they introduce scattering effects, in which waves reflect many times between different cracks in the subsurface, and it is likely cracks that introduce the dependence of elastic paramters on stress and strain, making rocks exhibit strong elastic nonlinearity. The long term goals of this research program are to better understand how to sense and characterize rocks. On the shorter term, we aim to (i) to better understand the role of cracks in the nonlinear elasticity of rocks with the long-term goal of using these parameters to image crack density and orientation and (ii) to use microseismic data sets to characterize scattering from cracks in volcanic regions to characterize cracks through scattering attenuation and fluids through intrinsic attenuation.