Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth
Previous studies of the microearthquakes (MEQs) produced from Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGSs) have focused on the initial phase of high‑pressure “stimulation.” Chamarczuk et al. [2025] track what happens during normal operation, the phase in which plants will spend most of their lives.
Using a distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) cable in a monitoring well and on‑site processing, the authors built a two‑month MEQ catalog through stimulation, crossflow testing, and five load‑following cycles. During those cycles, seismicity rose and fell with subsurface fluid pressure, then settled toward an equilibrium between injections. Event locations formed a cloud whose growth matched a simple diffusion model, which points to pressure migration as the main earthquake triggering mechanism.
These observations suggest that operators have the ability to control seismicity through careful management of injection rates and fluid pressure. They also demonstrate that affordable, real‑time monitoring is feasible for future commercial projects.
Citation: Chamarczuk, M., Ajo-Franklin, J., Nayak, A., Norbeck, J., Latimer, T., Titov, A., & Dadi, S. (2025). Insights into seismicity associated with flexibly operating enhanced geothermal system from real-time distributed acoustic sensing. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 130, e2025JB031634. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JB031634
—David Dempsey, Associate Editor, JGR: Solid Earth
Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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