Fault Displacement History and Segment Linkage in Assessing Injection-Induced Earthquakes: A Review of Basement-Rooted Faults in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas

Wastewater disposal into sedimentary formations has activated inherited basement-rooted faults across the central United States, but conventional operational and seismicity-based hazard assessments do not fully explain variations in fault activation or rupture extent. This integrative review evaluates evidence from Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas concerning fault displacement history, three-dimensional segmentation and linkage, structural maturity, hydraulic forcing, and the geomechanical response of basement faults. It synthesizes reflection-seismic investigations, relocated earthquake catalogs, pressure-diffusion and poroelastic models, fault slip-tendency analyses, and rupture-scaling studies published through 2025. Fort Worth Basin studies show that earthquake-hosting faults can lack resolvable recent geological displacement and that basic geometric descriptors do not reliably isolate seismogenic populations. Oklahoma and Kansas studies document basement-connected structures and the roles of injection-related pressure perturbations, fault orientation, and stress conditions, while three-dimensional fault-step research establishes pathways for seismicity migration without providing a universal earthquake-magnitude threshold. Three gaps remain: direct tests of linkage geometry against independently constrained rupture endpoints, harmonized comparisons of injection-exposed seismogenic and apparently quiet faults across basins, and out-of-sample evaluation of geological maturity as an incremental hazard predictor. A conceptual framework and controlled multi-basin research design are proposed to connect independent structural attributes, hydraulic exposure, mechanical state, and measured seismic outcomes. The review concludes that defensible induced-seismicity assessment requires joint treatment of structural inheritance, pressure transmission, contemporary stress, and observation uncertainty rather than reliance on any single fault or injection attribute. This review uses a structured study-comparison matrix and proposes, but does not report completion of, cross-basin empirical validation.