Comment on “The maximum possible and maximum expected earthquake magnitude for production-induced earthquakes at the gas field in Groningen, The Netherlands” by Gert Zöller and Matthias Holschneider

摘要

Zöller and Holschneider (2016) propose estimates of the maximum magnitude of induced earthquakes resulting from gas production in the Groningen field in The Netherlands by applying the approach of Zöller and Holschneider (2014) to the earthquake catalog for the Groningen field. We wish neither to make any comment on the analytical approach that the authors propose, nor to comment on their results in this particular application. We do feel obliged to clarify for readers the context of the study by Zöller and Holschneider (2016) in relation to the March 2016 workshop to which they refer. In particular, the sentence in their Introduction stating that “this short note provides the results of those authors” (p. 2917) could be interpreted as implying that their paper presents the results from the workshop. The paper by Zöller and Holschneider (2016) summarizes one of the many inputs that contributed to the workshop, but not the final outcome of the workshop.