Cremen, Gemma; Gupta, Abhineet; Baker, Jack; (2017) Evaluation of ground motion intensities from induced earthquakes using “Did You Feel It?” data. In: Proceedings of the 16th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering. National Information Centre of Earthquake Engineering (NICEE): Santiago, Chile.

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Abstract

The Central and Eastern United States has recently experienced a large number of earthquakes that are suspected of being induced by anthropogenic activities. Seismic risk assessment is known to be sensitive to ground motion predictions, so it is important to understand whether the intensity of ground shaking produced by those earthquakes differs relative to motions from comparable natural earthquakes. Unfortunately, due to sparse instrumentation in this area, we have limited recorded strong motion data and thus the question has not been resolved definitively. Here we attempt to address this question using U.S. Geological Survey “Did You Feel It?” (DYFI) data. Using a large set of DYFI survey responses (each with an inferred Macroseismic Intensity and a corresponding earthquake magnitude and distance), we evaluate differences between responses to natural and induced earthquakes. We find a trend that induced earthquakes produce comparable or possibly larger intensities at close distances to the causal earthquake, but that these intensities attenuate faster than natural earthquakes. This finding is consistent with previous literature on the topic, which infers that this effect may be due to induced earthquakes being shallow but having relatively low stress drops. Further we find that the deviations cannot be explained by underlying factors such as differences in exposed populations, survey response rates, or deviations in responses after a sequence of felt earthquakes. This work lends further credibility to the hypothesis that induced earthquakes are capable of producing strong near-fault ground shaking. Future work will investigate the impact of this phenomenon on seismic risk in the Central and Eastern United States.

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