How to observe fault injections in real time: Faults in the ground are known to deform in response to procedures such as wastewater injection that change the pore pressure. Guglielmi et al. took a crack at monitoring this process in real time with a controlled fluid injection into an inactive fault (see the Perspective by Cornet). Reactivating the dead fault induced aseismic slip, which triggered small earthquakes. These observations can inform models of how friction is related to slip rate. The technique can also be applied to field-scale monitoring of seismicity-inducing wastewater injections. Science , this issue p. 1224 ; see also p. 1204
1 December 2008 in International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences