Induced Earthquakes Inhibited by Shear Thickening Fluid

Abstract Induced seismicity is an inevitable consequence of subsurface resource development. Public concerns have been raised in cases where a surge in felt or damaging earthquakes has occurred because of industrial activity. The effective mitigation of induced earthquakes remains a major challenge despite the employment of several strategies. Here, we demonstrate that introducing shear thickening fluid into fault zones could effectively stabilize fault slip and inhibit earthquakes due to the fluid's rate‐dependent viscosity. In rotary‐shear friction experiments, the gouge‐fluid mixtures result in more stable slip than pure gouge samples, which exhibit stick‐slip motion under the same conditions. Additionally, the critical slip distance increases exponentially with increasing velocities, challenging the prevailing view that it is velocity‐independent. Since longer critical slip distances tend to promote fault stability, our results suggest that shear thickening fluid could delay or dampen the earthquake nucleation process as slip velocity increases, by directly modifying fault frictional properties.