Assessment of seismic spatiotemporal characteristics and migration distance in the Badong section of the Three Gorges Reservoir Area

Abstract

This paper aims to elucidate the seismic characteristics of the Three Gorges Reservoir area after impoundment and investigate the seismic source migration. Based on the seismic data analysis from the Badong segment in the Three Gorges Reservoir area, we assessed the local temporal and spatial variations in the frequent earthquakes. Correlation analysis was conducted to investigate the relationship between changes in reservoir water levels and the occurrence of reservoir-induced earthquakes. Additionally, we examined the regularity of earthquake occurrences at the exact location during different periods. Based on the fault mechanics principles, a formula was derived to estimate the length of open and wing-shaped rupture at the hypocenter under the influence of pore or excess pore water pressure. The results reveal that reservoir-induced seismicity demonstrates short-term cycles characterized by alternating "active periods" and "quiet periods," as well as long-term cycles with the combined periods. The probability of earthquakes occurring within one year at the epicentre is relatively high and decreases after four years. The derived formula can be utilized to estimate the seismic migration distance at the epicentre in the short term. These research findings provide valuable insights for analyzing the regularity of reservoir-induced earthquake activities and understanding the mechanism of seismic source migration.

Keywords

Reservoir-induced earthquake / Seismic migration / Pore water pressure / Earthquake source mechanism / Earthquake migration distance

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Guoyong Duan: Manuscript writing & experimental design. Fei Li: Participated in experiments, data organization and analysis, manuscript revision, submission, and funding. Kongwei Wang: Sample preparation, experimental design. Yaobo Xu: Participated in experiments & data organization.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Author agreement and acknowledgement

All authors agree for this publication. This research was supported by the Open Research Fund of Key Laboratory of Geological Hazards on Three Gorges Reservoir Area of China Three Gorges University, the Ministry of Education (2020KDZ12), the National Natural Science Foundation Joint Funded Project of China (U2034203), the Hubei Key Laboratory of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation of China Three Gorges University (2022KJZ08), the National Natural Science Foundation Joint Funded Project of China (U22A20600), Natural Science Research Pro-gram of Yichang City in 2023 (A23-2-047), Scientific Research Program of Hubei Provincial Department of Education in 2022 (B2022567).

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