Seismic damage zone and width–throw scaling along the strike-slip faults in the Ordovician carbonates in the Tarim Basin

Abstract

Understanding the scaling relation of damage zone width with displacement of faults is important for predicting subsurface faulting mechanisms and fluid flow processes. The understanding of this scaling relationship is influenced by the accuracy of the methods and types of data utilized to investigate faults. In this study, seismic reflection data are used to investigate the throw and damage zone width of five strike-slip faults affecting Ordovician carbonates of the Tarim intracraton basin, NW China. The results indicate that fault slips with a throw less than 200 m had formed wide damage zones up to 3000 m in width. Also, damage zone width is found to have both a positive correlation and a power-law relation with throw of two orders of magnitude, with a ratio of these values varying in a range of 2-15. The relationship between throw and damage zone width is not a simple power-law and changes its slope from small to larger size faults. The results indicate that throw scales well with damage zone width for the studied faults, and hence these can be used to predict fault geometries in the Tarim Basin. The study of the wide carbonate damage zones presented here provides new insights into scaling of large-size faults, which involve multiple faulting stages.

A New Growth Model of Fault Attributes in a Strike‐Slip Fault System in the Tarim Basin

“…Because the displacement is scattered on a wide deformation zone ( Fig. 4), we use the height difference, closer to the maximum cumulative throw, as an indicator for the deformation discrepancy across a fault zone (Ma et al, 2019;Wu et al, 2020). At the top of the Ordovician carbonate, the horizon is easy to trace to show T using the faulting deformation between the two walls along the fault strike ( Fig.…”

“…We collect the L and maximum T along fault strike, and segment Lo and Wo in the overlapping zones. The analytic methods of the relationships among these parameters are same as those of Ma et al (2019) and Wu et al (2020). Together with fault evolution, we propose a fault growth model for the Halahatang area.…”

Analysis of Seismic Damage Zones: A Case Study of the Ordovician Formation in the Shunbei 5 Fault Zone, Tarim Basin, China

“…In general, the type 1 damage zone is wider, and the throw is larger. Then, we compile the data of [36] in the Tazhong Uplift with our data (Figure 10). Although the Study area and the Tazhong Uplift are located in different structural units of Tarim Basin.…”

Fracture, Dissolution, and Cementation Events in Ordovician Carbonate Reservoirs, Tarim Basin, NW China

“…Furthermore, they stated that pore waters highly undersaturated with respect to calcite would in most cases be neutralized very rapidly during migration before reaching carbonate reservoirs and that consequently dissolution would be limited to a narrow reaction front along fractures in case acidic waters would reach the reservoir level. But in the case of Halahatang, the prevalence of active faults resulted in multistage reactivation of faults both in shear and in extension, and the formation of porous fault rock and dissolution-enhanced cavities, as evidenced by stylobreccias and associated fractures and vugs as well as fault rocks exposed in nearby outcrops ( [93]) and cavities imaged near faults [23,36,37,121]. On the basis of fault porosity and abundance and core observations, Ukar et al [93] suggest that local mesogenetic porosity enhancement of as much as 5-10% is plausible.…”