Scientists are deliberately causing earthquakes from a tunnel deep under the Alps. While this may sound like something out of a James Bond movie, the goal is not mayhem and destruction. Rather, researchers with Fault activation and earthquake (FEAR) are looking for ways to determine the risk of an earthquake before it happens.
Despite increasing monitoring of fault lines around the world, researchers still do not understand the immediate causes of fault lines. earthquakes. They also don't know why some ruptures occur on short sections of fault lines, while others stretch for miles, causing great destruction. Currently, geologists limit themselves to studying these events only after they have occurred. Domenico Giardiniprofessor of seismology and geodynamics at ETH Zürich, told Live Science.
This means they have to produce real earthquakes in a controlled environment with thousands of monitors right on the fault site, which is no easy task. But Giardini and his colleagues take advantage of the enormous power of the Alps themselves. These mountains on the border of Switzerland and Italy have deep faults; the zigzag networks of cracks underneath are a legacy of millions of years tectonics. The compressive force alone from the towering mountains above is enough to crush rocks 0.6 to 1.2 miles (1 to 2 kilometers) below the surface.
The rocks on the sides of these faults slide from time to time, releasing mostly small earthquakes. Using an existing tunnel that was once used to build a railroad, Project FEAR gets up close and personal with one of these faults and pumps water into them to trigger earthquakes on a convenient schedule.
“Sooner or later in the history of the Alps they would have happened, but we will make sure they happen next week,” Giardini said.
This process is similar to what happens when oil and gas companies pump wastewater from wells into faults in places like Oklahoma and Texas. This water lubricates the fractures, thereby reducing the friction required to break them.
The difference is that Giardini and his team have a dense network of seismometers and accelerometers right at the fault site, so they can precisely measure how it moves in response to this reduction in friction. The team has already triggered hundreds of thousands of sub-magnitude earthquakes. (Because earthquakes are measured on a nonlinear logarithmic scale, very small earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from zero to even with negative values.)
Next week, researchers will begin pumping hot water into the fault to see how temperature affects earthquake development. And in March, according to Giardini, they will begin to cause earthquakes up to magnitude 1.
The idea is that if they can figure out what parameters cause an earthquake of a certain size (if they can, in fact, cause an earthquake of any desired size), they will eventually be able to measure a dangerous fault in the real world before it ruptures, and calculate the kinds of stresses needed to cause an earthquake of a certain size on that fault.
“A couple of years ago [in February 2023]“There was a very strong earthquake on the border between Syria and Turkey,” Giardini said. “We know that the fault will continue in the south and north directions. We want to try to understand, will the next earthquake be a magnitude 7, magnitude 8 or magnitude 8.5?”
Some parameters, such as the degree of stress in the rocks outside the fault, are already proving important, he said. Researchers are also beginning to better understand how earthquakes move from one fault to another.
“We're seeing examples of what we ourselves produce underground that are very similar to what happens in nature,” Giardini said.
