Water inrush disaster is an important factor in restricting safe production of the coal mine. Taking the roadway in seam in Danhou Coal Mine, as the engineering background, according to the spatial relationship of the roadway, the impermeable layer, the fault and the loading conditions, the fault activation mechanical model under the roadway excavation disturbance was built, and the fault activ...

Deformation and focused fluid flow within a mineralized system are critical in the genesis of hydrothermal ore deposits. Dilation and integrated fluid flux due to coupled deformation and fluid flow in simple strike–slip fault geometries were examined using finite difference analysis in three dimensions. A series of generic fault bend and fault jog geometries consistent with those seen in the we...

Understanding the strength and slip behaviour of tectonic faults is a central problem in earthquake physics and seismichazard assessment1–8. Many major faults, including the San Andreas Fault, are weak compared with the surrounding rock, but the cause of this weakness is debated1. Previous measurements of the frictional strength of San Andreas Fault rocks are too high to explain the observed we...

Seismic data provide detailed information about subsurface structures. Reflection events visible in the seismic data are known as horizons, and indicate boundaries between different rock layers. A fault is a surface along which one side of rock layers has moved relative to the other in a direction parallel to the surface. Faults are recognized in seismic data by discontinuities of horizons. Fau...

This paper discusses Coulomb failure criteria for brittle deformation of intact rock and fault gouge. Data are presented from laboratory experiments designed to identify the critical gouge layer thickness required to effect a transition from the standard Coulomb criterion to a modified failure law (referred to as Coulomb plasticity) appropriate for simple shear of a gouge layer. Experiments wer...

Shear failure is the dominant mode of earthquake-causing rock failure along faults. High fluid pressure can also potentially induce rock failure by opening cavities and cracks, but an active example of this process has not been directly observed in a fault zone. Using borehole array data collected along the low-stress Chelungpu fault zone, Taiwan, we observed several small seismic events (I-typ...

Two-dimensional, numerical models of a linear fault embedded within a linear elastic medium show the generation of off-fault tensile failure that results from inelastic slip along the fault. We explore quasistatic models with slip-weakening friction to assess the effects of spatially and temporally variable friction on the damage patterns. Tensile fractures form where tangential normal stresses...

We analyze pervasive and discontinuous deformation associated with small faults in a quartz–syenite body in southern Israel. The analysis includes detailed mapping, measurement of in-situ mechanical rock properties and microstructural study of the faults. The mapped faults have 1–100-m-long horizontal traces, consisting of linked, curved segments; the segmented nature of the faults is also appa...

[1] We report on laboratory experiments examining the frictional and hydrologic properties of fault gouge and wall rock along a borehole transect that crosses a major out-of-sequence thrust splay fault within the Nankai accretionary complex. At 25 MPa effective normal stress, the fault zone material is frictionally weak (m 0.44) and exhibits low permeability after shearing (k < 5.5 10 20 m). Fa...