July News

Scaling relationship for fracture apertures from boreholes in basement

The latest in a long line of papers on fracture systems in basement rocks has just been posted in the “Online First” section of the Journal of the Geological Society of London. Following-on from Bob Holdsworth’s recent papers on the Lancaster field (see here and here), in the paper posted today Ken McCaffrey has collated a huge amount of data from multiple Durham PhD projects, incorporating fracture geometry data across a wide scale of measurements from onshore surface mapping and offshore well data.

One really interesting aspect of this work is that it includes scaling data for both fracture lengths and fracture apertures, and so provides an unusually rich basis for quantitative fracture network modelling.

1D and 2D scaling relationship for fracture lengths from basement fractures in outcrop, satellite imagery and seismic

1D and 2D scaling relationship for fracture lengths from basement fractures in outcrop, satellite imagery and seismic