DEVELOPING A BASELINE SEISMICITY CATALOG IN THE NORTH-CENTRAL AND NORTHEASTERN U.S. TO ASSIST WITH CCUS DEPLOYMENT

The crust in the central and eastern U.S. is thought to be critically stressed and thus past seismicity indicates the presence of faults that may host future earthquakes. Because Carbon Capture, Usage, and Storage (CCUS) can perturb the pore fluid pressure on preexisting faults leading them to premature failure, characterizing natural seismicity at candidate CCUS sites is important. We have begun developing a catalog of earthquakes across the 20-state region comprising the Midwest Regional Carbon Initiative study area. The catalog consists primarily of compiled historical earthquake lists available from monitoring networks and the literature. It also contains earthquakes located as part of EarthScope’s Transportable Array project by the Array Network Facility (ANF). Seismic events located by the ANF include natural earthquakes and mine blasts, and thus discriminating between the two event types is necessary. Event discrimination is labor-intensive, however, and we have developed machine-learning-based routines to automate this task. We will present our preliminary compilation of historical earthquakes and the additional earthquakes identified from the ANF event database.