Identification of Rock Mass Discontinuities in a Cloud of Seismic Event Hypocenters

Kijko, Andrzej (1999) Identification of Rock Mass Discontinuities in a Cloud of Seismic Event Hypocenters. Project Report. Safety in Mines Research Advisory Committee.

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Abstract

A technique to interpret a cluster of seismic events in terms of causative structures was developed. The technique consists of a process whereby the located hypocenters of events are moved within their confidence ellipsoids, by means of a statistical procedure, until a simplified pattern of the seismic event cluster is obtained. This simplified pattern might then be interpreted in terms of a fault, a system of faults or in general, as a rock mass discontinuity. Different approaches towards hypocenter confidence ellipsoid determination was investigated to determine which approach is most accurate. An updated approach was adopted in this project and implemented into the developed software. The software requires as input the data of the locations of recorded seismic events, as well as the location errors of the events. These location errors can either be entered manually into the program as an average value for the area under consideration, or calculated automatically and presented graphically by the program whenever the seismic network station co-ordinates are provided as additional input. The process was tested and is demonstrated in this report for three synthetic sets of data: a single fault, two joined faults and three separate faults. The tests revealed that the methodology was capable of enhancing accurate interpretations of possible causative geological features. These accurate interpretations might result in timely warnings about hazardous features, thus contributing to the safety of the mining personnel.

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Item Type: Reports (Project Report)
Subjects: Methodology > Method and procesing
Project: IS-EPOS project