Hydraulic fracturing accelerates fault creep in stable formations, loading unstable fault regions, resulting in dynamic rupture.

Understanding the source mechanisms of microseismic events is important for understanding the fracturing behavior and evolving stress field within a reservoir, knowledge of which can help to improve production and minimize seismic risk. The most common method for calculating the source mechanisms is moment-tensor inversion, which can provide the magnitudes, modes, and orientations of fractures. An overview of three common methods includes their advantages and limitations: the first-arrival polarity method, amplitude methods, and the full-waveform method. The first-arrival method is the quickest to implement but also the crudest, likely producing the least reliable results. Amplitude methods are also relatively simple but can better constrain the inversion because of the increased number of observations, especially those using S/P amplitude ratios. Full-waveform methods can provide results of very good quality, including source-time functions, but involve much more complex and expensive calculations and rely on accurate seismic-velocity models.

For tectonic earthquakes, slip rate spans a continuum from creep to supershear earthquakes, where slow slip events (SSEs) are important in releasing stress without radiating damaging seismic energy. Industrial-scale subsurface fluid injection has caused induced earthquakes, but the role of SSEs in fault activation is currently unclear. Ground-deformation observations, measured by satellite radar, show that SSEs up to magnitude 5.0 occurred during hydraulic fracturing (HF) operations in northwestern Canada, corroborated by reported deformation of the steel well casing. Although the magnitude 5.0 SSE exceeded the magnitude of the largest induced earthquake in this region (magnitude 4.55), it was undetected by seismograph networks. The observed SSEs occurred within a buried thrust belt and their magnitude and duration are consistent with scaling behavior of SSEs in unbounded natural systems, e.g. slab interfaces in subduction zones.

Source mechanisms of microseismic events, resolved as moment-tensor solutions, usually are obtained using either surface monitoring arrays, which appear to obtain mechanisms with high shear components, or borehole arrays, which tend to constrain more variable mechanisms with higher tensile components; however, the corresponding reliability of the solutions remains unclear. Synthetic tests are therefore conducted to compare the reliability of moment-tensor solutions from surface and two- and three-well borehole arrays based purely on geometry. Moment-tensor inversion is carried out for synthetically generated amplitudes with added random noise, and the bias and variance in the solutions are calculated. For the surface array, all inversions are able to constrain reliable results (with negligible bias and low variance), whereas borehole geometries with two wells produce reliable results only when including P- and S-wave amplitudes recorded on three components in the inversion (as is usual). Surface array inversion results show less bias and variance in the results compared with borehole results, and the three-borehole geometry shows significantly lower biases and estimation variances than the two-borehole geometry, most likely due to a greater sampling of the focal sphere. These results may explain in part why downhole moment-tensor inversion studies tend to resolve more variable mechanisms than surface arrays. Nonetheless, as well as geometry, other influences (e.g., signal-to-noise ratio) will influence the reliability of the solutions in real settings and different amplitude strengths of pure shear or tensile mechanisms combined with different path lengths, and thus energy dissipation for borehole or surface acquisitions also may play a role. Nonetheless, tests such as those in this study are useful to help design appropriate monitoring geometries and/or understand possible sources of bias and uncertainty in moment-tensor interpretations.

Seismic swarms are defined as an increase in seismicity that does not show a clear mainshock–aftershock sequence. Typically, swarms are primarily associated with either fluid migration or slow earthquakes (aseismic slip). In this study, we analyze a swarm induced by hydraulic fracturing (HF) that persisted for an unusually long duration of more than 10 months. Swarms ascribed to fluid injection are usually characterized by an expanding seismicity front; in this case, however, characteristics such as a relatively steady seismicity rate over time and lack of hypocenter migration cannot be readily explained by a fluid-diffusion model. Here, we show that a different model for HF-induced seismicity, wherein an unstable region of a fault is loaded by proximal, pore-pressure-driven aseismic slip, better explains our observations. According to this model, the steady seismicity rate can be explained by a steady slip velocity, while the spatial stationarity of the event distribution is due to lateral confinement of the creeping region of the fault with increased pore pressure. Our results may have important implications for other induced or natural seismic swarms, which could be similarly explained by aseismic loading of asperities driven by fluid overpressure rather than the often-attributed fluid-migration model.