Two species of microcracks

We identify two interrelated but independent species of microcracks with different origins and different distributions. One species is the classic high-stress microcracks identified in laboratory stress-cells associated with acoustic emissions as microcracks open with increasing stress. The other species is the low-stress distributions of closely-spaced stress-aligned fluid-saturated microcracks that observations of shear-wave splitting(SWS) demonstrate pervade almost all in situ rocks in the upper crust, the lower crust, and the uppermost 400 km of the mantle. On some occasions these two sets of microcracks may be interrelated and similar(hence ‘species') but they typically have fundamentally-different properties, different distributions, and different implications. The importance for hydrocarbon exploration and recovery is that SWS in hydrocarbon reservoirs monitors crack alignments and preferred directions of fluid-flow. The importance for earthquake seismology is that SWS above small earthquakes monitors the effects of increasing stress on the pervasive low-stress microcrack distributions so that stress-accumulation before, possibly distant, earthquakes can be recognised and impending earthquakes stress-forecast.

Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo inversion for anisotropy of PP-and PS-wave in weakly anisotropic and heterogeneous media

A single set of vertically aligned cracks embedded in a purely isotropic background may be con- sidered as a long-wavelength effective transversely iso- tropy （HTI） medium with a horizontal symmetry axis. The crack-induced HTI anisotropy can be characterized by the weakly anisotropic parameters introduced by Thomsen. The seismic scattering theory can be utilized for the inversion for the anisotropic parameters in weakly aniso- tropic and heterogeneous HTI media. Based on the seismic scattering theory, we first derived the linearized PP- and PS-wave reflection coefficients in terms of P- and S-wave impedances, density as well as three anisotropic parameters in HTI media. Then, we proposed a novel Bayesian Mar- kov chain Monte Carlo inversion method of PP- and PS- wave for six elastic and anisotropic parameters directly. Tests on synthetic azimuthal seismic data contaminated by random errors demonstrated that this method appears more accurate, anti-noise and stable owing to the usage of the constrained PS-wave compared with the standards inver- sion scheme taking only the PP-wave into account.