Seismic Interpretation of Fracture Specific Stiffness

Exploring the subsurface requires an understanding of the relationships among physical processes that occur on multiple length and time scales. Fractures and other mechanical discontinuities have geometric length scales that can be altered over time through such physical processes as stress, fluid transport, geochemical interactions, etc. This paper examines effect of the geometric length scales of discontinuities and the alteration of these length scales on the interpretation of fracture properties from seismic measurements. For a given seismic frequency range, the predicted fracture specific stiffness as a function of frequency is a key diagnostic indicator of the spatial homogeneity or heterogeneity within a fracture.