Numerical simulation of the 2008 West-Bohemian earthquake swarm

CO2 has long been suspected of driving the Bohemian earthquake swarms because of the migrating nature of the swarms and expressions of CO2 degassing at the surface. Modeling to date primarily employed linear diffusion models, but more sophisticated modeling that includes a coupled fluid - and rock mechanical model has been lacking. In this work, we apply a model that couples mechanics to heat and flow of a super-critical CO2 through a fracture network. We present a continuum mechanical approach to derive the seismic moment magnitude using the deviatoric strain as an indicator of rupturing processes during individual events. We use a peak-detection algorithm to identify rapid changes in deviatoric strain, indicative of slip events. This method has been shown to work very well in dry and fluid-induced fracturing experiments at the laboratory scale, and in this work we extend the method to the scale of the West Bohemia/Vogtland earthquake swarms. We show very good agreement between model results and observations of the 2008 swarm, further supporting the hypothesis that the Bohemian earthquake swarms are predominately fluid-driven. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.