TY - DATA T1 - A hands-on guide for computing and exploring focal mechanisms in the North Sea for risk mitigation of large-scale CO2 injections. PY - 2025/08/13 AU - Evgeniia Martuganova AU - David Francisco Naranjo Hernandez AU - A. (Auke) Barnhoorn UR - DO - 10.4121/e1254235-c512-4310-9731-9499c2d2fa2f.v1 KW - CCS KW - moment tensor inversion KW - focal mechanisms KW - North Sea N2 -

The success of CCS depends heavily on understanding the present-day stress field to anticipate reservoir and cap rock response to fluid injection. Despite its importance, many proposed carbon storage sites in the North Sea are located in areas with little to no borehole stress data available, presenting a significant challenge. Within the ACT project SHARP Storage framework, we have addressed this gap by generating a comprehensive earthquake bulletin for the North Sea, revealing spatial clusters of seismic events with the majority of earthquakes with ML < 4. Focal mechanisms of earthquakes are excellent indicators of crustal dynamics, which are essential for assessing the present-day stress field. Therefore, to improve the understanding of the in-situ stress conditions, we created a comprehensive workflow to evaluate focal mechanisms based on data from the North Sea. This guide represents an explanation of the workflow, which was used to evaluate focal mechanisms of the earthquakes with a data of sufficient quality.

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