A new case of reservoir triggered seismicity: Govind Ballav Pant reservoir (Rihand dam), central India

We report here that seismicity near Govind Ballav Pant reservoir is strongly influenced by the reservoir operations. It is the second largest reservoir in India, which is built on Rihand river in the failed rift region of central India. Most of the earthquakes occurred during the high water stand in the reservoir with a time lag of about 1 month. We use the concept of coulomb stress change and use Green's function based approach to estimate stresses and pore pressure due to the reservoir load. We find that the reservoir increases coulomb stress on the nearby faults of the region that are favourably oriented for failure in predominantly reverse slip manner under the NNE–SSW compression and thus promotes failure. The above two factors make it an obvious, yet so far unreported case of reservoir triggered seismicity.