Publications related to Sedimentary basin

Three-dimensional hydraulic fracture propagation in homogeneous and heterogeneous media

Hydraulic fractures are tensile fractures that occur in solid materials due to the natural intrusion or anthropogenic injection of a viscous fluid into a fracture channel. The deliberate creation of hydraulic fractures is part of an industrial technology h ...

EPFL2023

Propagation of planar three-dimensional buoyant hydraulic fractures

Andreas Möri

Hydraulic fractures are driven by an internal fluid pressure exceeding the minimum compressive stress, propagating in a direction perpendicular to the latter. This class of tensile fractures has gained interest over the last fifty years due to the developm ...

EPFL2023

Inception of Regular Valley Spacing in Fluvial Landscapes: A Linear Stability Analysis

Sara Bonetti, Shashank Kumar Anand

Incipient valley formation in mountainous landscapes is often associated with their presence at a regular spacing under diverse hydroclimatic forcings. Here we provide a formal linear stability theory for a landscape evolution model (LEM) representing the ...

2022

Long-term triggered seismicity on the Mosha fault by Damavand volcano, Iran: Implications on the seismic hazard of Tehran metropolis

Seyyedmaalek Momeni

The seismic history of the Mosha fault, the largest and most active fault of Eastern Tehran metropolis, and its relation to the Damavand active volcano, the highest mountain in the Middle East, is investigated. We deduce that the central Mosha, near the Da ...

2022

On the scale dependence in the dynamics of frictional rupture: Constant fracture energy versus size-dependent breakdown work

Marie Estelle Solange Violay, François Xavier Thibault Passelègue, Mathias Alexandre David Lebihain, Federica Paglialunga, Fabian Barras

Potential energy stored during the inter-seismic period by tectonic loading around faults is released during earthquakes as radiated energy, frictional dissipation and fracture energy. The latter is of first importance since it is expected to control the n ...

2022

Global Free-Energy Landscapes as a Smoothly Joined Collection of Local Maps

Michele Ceriotti, Gareth Aneurin Tribello, Federico Giberti

Enhanced sampling techniques have become an essential tool in computational chemistry and physics, where they are applied to sample activated processes that occur on a time scale that is inaccessible to conventional simulations. Despite their popularity, i ...

2021

The Effects of Planetary and Stellar Parameters on Brittle Lithospheric Thickness

Marie Estelle Solange Violay, Michael Heap

The thicknesss of the brittle lithosphere—the outer portion of a planetary body that fails via fracturing— plays a key role in the geological processes of that body. The properties of both a planet and its host star can influence that thickness, and the po ...

2021

Propagation of fluid driven fractures in transversely isotropic material

Fatima-Ezzahra Moukhtari

The propagation of fluid driven fractures is used in a number of industrial applications (well stimulation of unconventional reservoirs, development of deep geothermal systems) but also occurs naturally (magmatic dyke intrusion). While the mechanics of hyd ...

EPFL2020

Breaking of Internal Waves and Turbulent Dissipation in an Anticyclonic Mode Water Eddy

Bieito Fernandez Castro

A four-month glider mission was analyzed to assess turbulent dissipation in an anticyclonic eddy at the western boundary of the subtropical North Atlantic. The eddy (radius ≈ 60 km) had a core of low potential vorticity between 100–450 m, with maximum radi ...

2020

Complex Dynamics in Simple Neural Networks: Understanding Gradient Flow in Phase Retrieval

Florent Gérard Krzakala, Lenka Zdeborová

Despite the widespread use of gradient-based algorithms for optimizing high-dimensional non-convex functions, understanding their ability of finding good minima instead of being trapped in spurious ones remains to a large extent an open problem. Here we fo ...

Curran Associates, Inc.2020

Convection in Lakes

Alfred Johny Wüest, Damien Bouffard

Lakes and other confined water bodies are not exposed to tides, and their wind forcing is usually much weaker compared to ocean basins and estuaries. Hence, convective processes are often the dominant drivers for shaping mixing and stratification structure ...

2019

Hydro-mechanical response of Opalinus Clay shale: dependency on composition and burial depth

Eleonora Crisci

Shales are sedimentary formation currently studied for their involvement in many geo-energy related applications, such as radioactive waste disposal, CO2 sequestration, oil and gas extraction. In Switzerland the Opalinus Clay shale has been selected has ho ...

EPFL2019

Dynamic anticrack propagation in snow

Johan Alexandre Philippe Gaume

Continuum numerical modeling of dynamic crack propagation has been a great challenge over the past decade. This is particularly the case for anticracks in porous materials, as reported in sedimentary rocks, deep earthquakes, landslides, and snow avalanches ...

Nature Research2018

Impact of the anisotropy of fracture toughness on the propagation of planar 3D hydraulic fracture

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Haseeb Zia, Weihan Zhang

Sedimentary rocks often exhibit a transverse isotropy due to fine scale layering. We investigate the effect of the anisotropy of fracture toughness on the propagation of a planar 3D hydraulic fracture perpendicular to the isotropy plane: a configuration co ...

2018

Morphological resilience to flow fluctuations of fine sediment deposits in bank lateral cavities

Anton Schleiss, Mário Jorge Rodrigues Pereira Da Franca, Carmelo Juez Jiménez, Matthias Thalmann

Lateral cavities are built in the banks of rivers for several purposes: to create harbors, to capture sed- iment, to keep a central navigable channel (i.e., Casiers de Girardon in the Rhone river) or to promote the formation of aquatic habitats if a limite ...

2018

Reservoir stimulation’s effect on depletion-induced seismicity

Lyesse Laloui, Barnaby Padraig Fryer, Gunter Siddiqi

Depletion-induced seismicity can pose a problem in some fluid-producing subsurface reservoirs, in some cases requiring production rate control in order to limit the seismicity. This study investigates the use of reservoir stimulation to reduce the depletio ...

2018

Probabilistic Prediction and Forecast of Daily Suspended Sediment Concentration on the Upper Yangtze River

Mário Jorge Rodrigues Pereira Da Franca, José Pedro Gamito de Saldanha Calado Matos, Xin Lu

Sediment transport in suspension can represent more than 90% of a river's total annual flux of sediment. In the case of the Yangtze River, more than 99% of the sediment supplied to the sea is suspended load. Suspended sediment is thus an important componen ...

AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION2018

EFFECT OF THE BED LOAD GRADATION ON THE MORPHODYNAMICS OF DISCORDANT CONFLUENCES

Anton Schleiss, Mário Jorge Rodrigues Pereira Da Franca, Sebastián Guillén Ludeña, António Heleno Cardoso

Within the fluvial network, river confluences are particular areas characterized by complex hydrodynamic, morphodynamic and sedimentary processes. These processes have been observed to be governed by parameters such as the discharge ratio, the junction ang ...

2017

The role of the stress regime on microseismicity induced by overpressure and cooling in geologic carbon storage

Victor Vilarrasa Riano

Fluid injection in deep geological formations usually induces microseismicity. In particular, industrial-scale injection of CO2 may induce a large number of microseismic events. Since CO2 is likely to reach the storage formation at a lower temperature than ...

Wiley-Blackwell2016

Geologic carbon storage is unlikely to trigger large earthquakes and reactivate faults through which CO2 could leak

Victor Vilarrasa Riano

Zoback and Gorelick [(2012) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 109(26): 10164-10168] have claimed that geologic carbon storage in deep saline formations is very likely to trigger large induced seismicity, which may damage the caprock and ruin the objective of keeping ...

National Academy of Sciences2015