Man-made earthquakes prevention through monitoring and discharging of their causative stress-deformed states

Abstract

Despite our understanding of the different mechanisms of man-made earthquakes, their short-term prediction and prevention is yet to be attained. In the present study, we propose an integrated four-step approach to predict and prevent man-made earthquakes or reduce their chance of occurrence. Our four-step approach includes locating the highly anomalous zones of microseismic emission (MSE) that result from the stress-deformed state inside a geological formation and often represents the “seismic nuclei” for impending earthquakes, monitoring the variations and dynamics of the anomalous MSE zones over a period of one lunar month, inducing a creep-discharging of the MSE zones using a vibroseis seismic source at the ground surface, and monitoring the same MSE zones following the creep-discharge to determine whether the stress-deformed state was released and the chance of potential earthquake occurrence has been eliminated or reduced. The proposed full four-step approach has never implemented at one single location. Nevertheless, these steps have been tested separately at different sites and have proven successful. We propose conducting the full four-step approach at various locations of potential man-made earthquake activities around the world including the state of Oklahoma in the USA.