Partial Stress Drop and Frictional Overshoot Mechanism of Seismic Events Induced by Mining

Abstract

—The values of uniformly estimated apparent stress σa and Brune’s stress drop, taken as a measure of static stress drop, from 850 seismic events, with moment magnitude ranging from −3.6 to 3.6, induced at the Underground Research Laboratory (URL) in Canada, Western Deep Levels (WDL) gold mine in South Africa, and two coal and two copper mines in Poland, were collected to study the stress release mode in various mining environments. For this, the quantity epsilon, ɛ=Δσ/(σa + Δσ/2), where Δσ is the static stress drop, proposed by Zuniga (1993) as an indicator of stress-drop mechanism was used. The events induced at the URL are characterized by low values of epsilon corresponding to a partial stress drop mechanism, whereas all the events at WDL display a frictional overshoot mechanism in which final stress reaches a lower value than that of frictional stress. The events at Polish coal and copper mines, on the other hand, are in good agreement with the well-known Orowan’s condition such that the final stress is equal to the dynamic frictional stress.¶The Brune stress drop, however, is heavily model dependent through the source radius-corner frequency relation. The Orowan’s condition for the events from the URL would be met if a constant in the source radius-corner frequency relation is equal to 1.82 ± 0.12, and for the events from WDL if it is equal to 3.92 ± 0.40, in contrast to Brune’s constant of 2.34.¶The smoothed values of epsilon displayed as a function of time, represented by the consecutive event numbers, for selected sets of events imply that the largest seismic events in a given set occur when the epsilon is low and a partial stress drop mechanism is dominant. The large events are then followed by high epsilon values when a frictional overshoot mechanism begins to dominate.