Abstract
Understanding the scaling relation of damage zone width with displacement of faults is important for predicting subsurface faulting mechanisms and fluid flow processes. The understanding of this scaling relationship is influenced by the accuracy of the methods and types of data utilized to investigate faults. In this study, seismic reflection data are used to investigate the throw and damage zone width of five strike-slip faults affecting Ordovician carbonates of the Tarim intracraton basin, NW China. The results indicate that fault slips with a throw less than 200 m had formed wide damage zones up to 3000 m in width. Also, damage zone width is found to have both a positive correlation and a power-law relation with throw of two orders of magnitude, with a ratio of these values varying in a range of 2–15. The relationship between throw and damage zone width is not a simple power-law and changes its slope from small to larger size faults. The results indicate that throw scales well with damage zone width for the studied faults, and hence these can be used to predict fault geometries in the Tarim Basin. The study of the wide carbonate damage zones presented here provides new insights into scaling of large-size faults, which involve multiple faulting stages.
Highlights
IntroductionHighly deformed cores and wider damage zones (e.g., Kim et al 2004; Agosta et al 2012)
Faults usually exhibit narrow, highly deformed cores and wider damage zones (e.g., Kim et al 2004; Agosta et al 2012)
When outlying values were filtered out, the fault throw–width plots showed an explicit positive relationship with scattering of samples less than 2 orders of magnitude (Fig. 9b). These indicated that the proxy of throw instead of displacement is effective for predicting damage zone width in carbonate strike-slip fault zones in the subsurface
Summary
Highly deformed cores and wider damage zones (e.g., Kim et al 2004; Agosta et al 2012). The basin is floored by Archean-Early Neoproterozoic crystalline basement that is covered by a thick, Late NeoproterozoicQuaternary sediments affected by polyphase tectonism: (1) supercontinent assembly and breakup in Late Neoproterozoic, (2) opening and closure of the Tethys and the PaleoAsian Ocean during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic and (3) the Indo-Asian collision in the Cenozoic (Jia 1997; Li et al 2010; Wu et al 2016 and references therein) The largest Ordovician condensate field in China was discovered in recent years in the northern slope of the Central Uplift (Du 2010; Zhu et al 2014) This region covers an area of 22,000 km in the central part of the Tarim Basin (Fig. 1; Wu et al 2012, 2016) and contains Cambrian–Late
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