Reassessment of the probability of higher magnitude earthquakes in the Groningen gas field.

Abstract

A higher than predicted annual frequency of earthquakes with a magnitude equal or above 3.0 has led to an independent assessment by State Supervision of Mines (SSM) of the available Groningen earthquake data and the applied analysis methods. The occurrence of the highest magnitude earthquake thus far, near Huizinge in August 2012, with a moment magnitude of 3.6 gave further impetus. In the re-assessment SSM has limited the analysis to the earthquake data from the Groningen field only.