Fault Damage Zone in Seismic Data

Fault play a key role on fluid flow in the subsurface. They are 3D damage zone with most of the deformation at the centre and decreasing toward the boundary of their damage zone. Seismic data is one of the main ways to characterise them. Here we are going to show the potential of seismic data for characterising fault damage zone. For that we use a multi-attribute analysis that combines dip, tensor and semblance attributes into a combined cube, and additional attributes, such as fault enhancement or total horizontal derivative. These allow us to extract a fault geobody or seismic facies that can relate different deformation intensity within the damage zone. We present examples from synthetic seismic generated for normal faults in siliclastic sequences and on real seismic data where we associate the fault damage through a conceptual model. Such analyses can be used to qualitatively describe fault damage or to condition geomodels of faults in the subsurface.