Abstract

Nowadays, because of the intensive use of hydraulic fracturing (HF) in mining, the study of its impact on mining extraction becomes crucial. Here we use the Sotolongo-Costa-Posadas (SCP) model, which is based on Tsallis formalism, to assess the impact of HF on the microearthquakes' magnitudes and interevent times in a Chilean underground mine. In this regard, we analyse the seismic hazard at regions with HF and HF-free, which is an important issue for workers' safety and continuity of the mining operations. The results reveal that the HF diminishes the value of the q entropic index associated with the SCP model, which implies that the magnitude and the autocorrelation of the microearthquakes decrease.