Abstract
According to the Coulomb failure criterion the variation of either shear stress, normal stress, or pore pressure can affect the occurrence, or not, of earthquakes. Abnormalseismicity increasesaroundreservoirsareoftenthoughttobeinducedbythe water impounded behind the dam, which leads to nearby increases in crustal pore pres- sure and Coulomb stress, and so may promote the nearby faults to fail. To investigate how much the Zipingpu reservoir, whose dam is just a few hundred meters from the Longmen Shan fault, influenced the 12 May 2008 Wenchuan earthquakeM w 7.9, we calculatedtheCoulombstressvariationinducedbythefillingoftheZipingpureservoir, which began in October 2005. We also analyzed the correlation between local seismi- cityvariationsandtheinducedCoulombstressvariations.BoththecalculatedCoulomb stress variations and the observed seismicity analysis suggest that the probability that the huge Wenchuan earthquake,M w 7.9, was induced by the Zipingpu reservoir is very low. The filling of the Zipingpu reservoir could only result in an increase in the rate of shallowearthquakeswithhypocenterdepthsmallerthan5kmnearthereservoirregion.
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