THE ROLE OF FAULT GROWTH AND CONNECTIVITY ON FLUID AND VOLATILE TRANSPORT IN THE CRUST

Crustal deformation such as faulting, fracturing, and folding has long been recognized as a major control on fluid and gas transport within earth’s crust, creating fast flow pathways for the migration of groundwater and potential contaminants in some cases, while becoming barriers and traps for oil and gas in others. Understanding how faults and fractures grow, link, and evolve is critical to understanding fault network connectivity pathways for fluid and volatile migration. However, the role of heterogeneity in the crust – which varies both laterally and within stratigraphic layers – on the growth and linkage of fracture networks is not well understood. The role of pressurized fluids, such as magmatic intrusion and hydraulic fracturing, in creating and/or reactivating existing fractures is even less well characterized. This talk will focus on current terrestrial analyses of fault and fracture connectivity, with examples from contaminant transport, magma intrusion, and petroleum reservoir characterizations as proxies for exploration (and extraction) of fluids and volatiles of interest in the inner solar system. These techniques, such as displacement versus length, faulty connectivity, and in situ stress analyses have application to several terrestrial bodies, ranging from volcanic-tectonic interactions to groundwater flow and ground-ice storage in the crust. With the wealth of new and higher resolution data returned from recent and ongoing missions to Mercury, Mars and the Moon, many of these terrestrial analyses can now be applied toward a better understanding of fluid and volatile transport in rocky lithospheres.