Travels: Deep Fault Drilling Project Oct 2014

Deep Fault Drilling Project

• Involves more than 100 scientists from 12 countries with diverse specialties
• Plan is to intersect the Alpine Fault at 1.1 km depth
• Rock drill core will be taken for detailed lab study
• Geophysical instruments will be installed deep inside the fault to provide ongoing monitoring
• This is the first time a major fault will be probed in detail prior to a major earthquake rupture

DFDP aims to answer three key questions:
• What will happen when the fault ruptures? What will be its impact on South Island infrastructure?
• Does the probability of rupture change through time? For example, from week to week?
• Can specialist monitoring provide warning of the next rupture?

Some flyers I made for the project:

Predicting earthquakes has been a dream of earth scientists for ages. Unfortunately progress has been limited to date.

To understand the difficulty facing earthquake prediction, consider weather prediction. To accurately predict weather we utilise tens of monitoring satellites, thousands of weather stations, and thousands of weather balloons daily. Because of the large amount of data collected over time we are able to understand the complex physics and interactions driving the weather and accurately model over a week into the future.

By comparison faults are a black box. We rely on observations of rocks brought up to the surface, and geophysical data measured at a distance. Only through studies like DFDP can we determine the rock type, frictional properties, temperature, stress state, and fluid pressures, which can all contribute to earthquake physics. Although we may be a long way from accurately predicting earthquakes, studies like DFDP can give us the data we need to understand how faults behave leading up to a major earthquake.