Temporal patterns of induced seismicity in Oklahoma revealed from multi-station template matching

Journal of Seismology
By: , and 

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Abstract

Over the past decade, Oklahoma became the most seismically active region of the mid-Continental USA as a result of industry operations. However, seismic network limitations and completeness of earthquake catalogs have restricted the types of analyses that can be performed. By applying multi-station template matching on the 23,889 cataloged earthquakes in Oklahoma and Southern Kansas between late-2008 and 2016, we increased the number of detected earthquakes to 209,409 events. While the improved catalog produced an order of magnitude events than the original catalog, the frequency-magnitude distribution remains similar to the original catalog. We found that the coefficient of variation of interevent times in small spatial bins tends to spatially correlate with the location of M ≥ 4 earthquakes. The improved catalog reveals the pervasiveness of swarm-like patterns in seismicity across the entire study region. The rapid increase in seismicity rate of these swarms in 2013 coincided with a reduction in the calculated p values (power law decay rates) before and after larger events. We also used the catalog to revisit the temporal patterns in the four M ≥ 5 sequences, finding more active foreshock behavior than previously recognized and variations in aftershock behavior. When compared against poroelastic stress models for the Pawnee and Fairview sequences, the catalog shows an improved correlation with stress that accounts for variable-rate injection, supporting the conclusion that injection rate is an important contributor to seismic hazard.

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Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title Temporal patterns of induced seismicity in Oklahoma revealed from multi-station template matching
Series title Journal of Seismology
DOI 10.1007/s10950-019-09864-9
Volume 24
Year Published 2020
Language English
Publisher Springer
Contributing office(s) Earthquake Science Center
Description 15 p.
First page 921
Last page 935
Country United States
State Oklahoma
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