Using PS-InSAR observations to detect aseismic fault slip in the
seismically active Groningen gas field
Abstract
Since the start of production in 1968 in the Groningen gas field
(Netherlands) considerable land subsidence (>30 cm) has
occurred above the field. Variability in reservoir compaction has led to
earthquakes on reactivated Mesozoic age reservoir faults. Even though
the impact of this seismicity (MW ≤3.6) on society has
been large, due to substantial structural damage to buildings, surface
deformation induced by the co-seismic slip has been too small to detect
using geodetic data. It is possible that differential compaction across
faults is not only accommodated by seismic slip, but also by aseismic
slip (e.g., creep). Aseismically slipping reservoir faults would relax
the stresses in the reservoir and, thus, reduce the severity of the
seismicity. In this study we explore the potential occurrence of
aseismic slip on the reservoir faults. We perform a sensitivity analysis
to investigate whether aseismic slip on the different reservoir faults
has the capacity to produce detectable surface signals. We use the
analytical Okada (1992) model of slip on a discrete dislocation in a
uniform elastic half-space to simulate the deformations originating from
slip on a wide range of fault geometries, representing the variability
in the field. Unsurprisingly, laterally extensive faults with strong
compaction contrasts across them (large differential slip magnitudes)
produce the largest surface signals. To determine which potentially
aseismically slipping faults produce surface signals that could be
detectable in persistent scatterer InSAR time series, we analyze the
surface patterns for large differential displacements across large
length scales, since InSAR observations are most sensitive to spatially
extensive patterns with high spatial gradients. We use the results of
the sensitivity analysis to guide our search for patterns originating
from aseismically slipping reservoir faults in PS-InSAR time series data
of the Groningen area. First results show that these specific patterns
are rare, indicating that the amount of aseismic slip is limited. For
faults lacking surface signals related aseismic slip, the results of
sensitivity analysis are used to determine upper limits for the aseismic
differential slip magnitudes.