Stress Drop Variations of Induced Earthquakes near the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport, Texas

Abstract

We estimate stress drops for injection-induced earthquakes near the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport in the Fort Worth basin (FWB), Texas, to investigate source properties in response to fluid injection. The stress drops for the Airport sequence show three unique characteristics compared to those estimated for other earthquake sequences in the FWB: (1) stress drops have lower mean and median values; (2) stress drops increase with moment magnitude; and (3) stress drops increase in size over the first 1.5 km in radial distance from the injection point. The low stress drop Airport events occurred shortly after the initiation of injection near a fault within hundreds of meters of the well. Pore pressure perturbations in the Airport area are 1 order of magnitude lower than those from the other sequences, suggesting that absolute pore pressure changes may not be the main factors of stress drop variations. We suggest that the low stress drop events may be related to transition from aseismic slip to seismic rupture previously observed in laboratory and field experiments.