Recommendation for the discrimination of human-related and natural seismicity (Letter to the Editor)

Various techniques are utilized by the seismological community, extractive industries, energy and geoengineering companies to identify earthquake nucleation processes in close proximity to engineering operation points. These operations may comprise fluid extraction or injections, artificial water reservoir impoundments, open pit and deep mining, deep geothermal power generations or carbon sequestration.

In this letter to the Editor, we outline several lines of investigation that we suggest to follow to address the discrimination problem between natural seismicity and seismic events induced or triggered by geoengineering activities. The suggestions have been developed by a group of experts during several meetings and workshops and we feel that their publication as summary report is helpful for the geoscientific community. Specific investigation procedures and discrimination approaches, on which our recommendations are based, are also published in this Special Issue (SI) in Journal of Seismology.