Dr. Chunfang Meng, Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Earth Resources Laboratory, presents "Adaptively switching between (quasi-) static and dynamic models" on November 20, 2015.

"When we model reservoir depletion/injection induced earthquakes, we need to at least consider two parts, inducting process and resulting seismicity. These two parts however, are usually modeled differently and separately. Inducing process due to its large time scale is described as (quasi-) static process governed by poro-(visco-) elastic equation. Seismic radiation is modeled by elastodynamic/wave equation. This brings up the question that how do we model the earthquake cluster triggered by the “slow” reservoir depletion and injection?
Work has been done based on an open source code Defmod to bring the quasi-static and dynamic models together forming a hybrid model. This model can adaptively switch between static and dynamic runs depending on the stress state and fault constitutive laws. The stress perturbation caused by previous fault slip is taken into account when a later slip is about to take place."