The impact of an in-situ stress gradient on the growth of a fluid-driven frictional rupture

Abstract

Models of injection-induced aseismic slip commonly assume uniform in-situ stresses along the fault, and thus predict rupture growth symmetric about the injection point. We relax this assumption and account for linear variations with depth of the resolved shear and effective normal tractions. We consider a planar fault with constant friction under plane-strain conditions, subjected to fluid injection at constant overpressure. Vanishing stress intensity factors at both rupture tips yield two coupled equations for the up-dip and down-dip tip positions. We solve them semi-analytically and compare the results with numerical simulations. The stress gradient notably breaks the self-similarity of the uniform-stress solution. Growth is then governed by two parameters. The first is the fault-stress injection parameter $\mathcal{T}$, ratio between the initial distance to failure at the injection point and the effect of the fluid overpressure. The second is the ratio of the diffusion length $\sqrt{4αt}$ to a stress-gradient length scale $L_c$, namely the initial distance to failure at the injection point divided by its gradient along the fault. Growth is symmetric at early times. In the marginally pressurized regime, rupture lags behind the pressure front and the relative asymmetry grows as $1.1\,(4αt/L_c^2)^{1/2}$. The up-dip tip then accelerates markedly compared to the down-dip tip. In the critically stressed regime, rupture outpaces diffusion by a factor of order $1/\mathcal{T}$, and the relative asymmetry grows as $\sim 0.34\,(4αt/\mathcal{T}^2L_c^2)^{1/2}$. The up-dip tip reaches $\sim L_c$ earlier, and the ratio of up-dip to down-dip rupture lengths remains below two.