Study by Beatrice Magnani, USGS and other SMU scientists shows recent seismicity in Fort Worth Basin occurred on faults not active for 300 million years.
Recent earthquakes in the Fort Worth Basin – in the rural community of Venus and the Dallas suburb of Irving – occurred on faults that had not been active for at least 300 million years, according to research led by SMU seismologist Beatrice Magnani.
The research supports the assertion that recent North Texas earthquakes were induced, rather than natural – a conclusion entirely independent of previous analyses correlating seismicity to the timing of wastewater injection practices, but that corroborates those earlier findings. The full study, “Discriminating between natural vs induced seismicity from long-term deformation history of intraplate faults,” published by Science Advances, is available online.
“To our knowledge this is the first study to discriminate natural and induced seismicity using classical structural geology analysis techniques,” said Magnani, associate professor of geophysics in SMU’s Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. Co-authors for the study include Michael L. Blanpied, associate coordinator of the USGS Earthquake Hazard program, and SMU seismologists Heather DeShon and Matthew Hornbach.
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