8 Multidisciplinary studies of fault and earthquake hazard in low-strain environments: Applications to the Intermountain West region (Posters)

This session invites contributions that aim to characterize earthquake hazard within the low-strain Intermountain West region. We encourage abstracts that span field-based paleoseismology and geophysical studies and are particularly interested in interdisciplinary investigations.

Monday, 18 May 2026
8:00 AM - 5:30 PM
Alvarado D/E

Induced Seismic Deformation in the Delaware Basin of Texas

Paper number: 8-1
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 8:00 AM – 8:00 AM

Authors

Abstract

Located at the southern tip of the Rocky Mountain within the US, historically the Delaware Basin is lack of natural-occurred earthquakes and showing low tectonic strain. In the last two decades, the booming of oil and gas activities (wastewater disposal and hydrocarbon extraction) have triggered very active induced seismicity in the Delaware Basin. The hypocenters located using a 3-D tomography model show that a vast majority of the earthquakes are placed beneath the basin-basement interface, indicative of the basement-rooted fault systems. Notably six M≥5 earthquakes have been documented since 2017. Together they have generated significant crustal deformation. Meanwhile, the sheer mount of induced earthquakes have enabled us to map the present-day stress field of the Delaware Basin. To address the tectonic significance, in this presentation we collected previously published and newly determined focal mechanisms to invert for the regional stress model of the Permian Basin, and quantified the seismic-moment release across the Delaware Basin. We parameterized the model by 0.15°(longitude) x 0.1°(latitude) grid-spacing to group focal mechanisms for performing 2-D stress inversion, and used a trade-off curve to determine the optimal damper for regulating the model variation. We aimed to pursue a smooth gradient of the stress model and reveal the stress characteristics at the same time. Although the inversion results suggest that the Delaware Basin contains an extensional stress field in general, the trend of the principal stress axes are rotating within the basin. Further we used seismic-moment release as a proxy to evaluate the seismic deformation resulted from induced seismicity. We observed a particular pattern of the cumulative seismic-moment release within the Delaware Basin: it is higher in areas north of the Grasham Fault Zone and lower in the south of the fault zone. On the other hand, the geodetic observations (InSAR) have shown uplift displacement in the areas having handful M≥5 normal-faulting earthquakes and with higher seismic-moment release. However, a time-lapse InSAR analysis suggests subsidence was predominant after the occurrence of M≥5 normal-faulting earthquakes and reduced pore-fluid pressure. The latter one was due to the halt of fluid-injection. In conclusion, the current seismic deformation in the Delaware Basin is jointly controlled by the fluid-injection pace and the seismicity.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 58, No. 4

doi: 10.1130/abs/2026RM-410644

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