Aspects of Tectonic Faulting: In Honour of Georg Mandl

235 Pages·2000·16.51 MB·English

by  Peter A. Cundall (auth.), Florian K. Lehner, Janos L. Urai (eds.)

F. K. Lehner J. L. Urai (Eds.)
Aspects of Tectonic Faulting
Springer
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F. K. Lehner J. L. Urai (Eds.)
ASPECTS OF TECTONIC FAULTING
In Honour of Georg Mandl
With 88 Figures, 6 in color
Springer
Florian K. Lehner
Institute for Geology and Paleontology
University of Salzburg
Hellbrunner Strasse 34
5020 Salzburg, Austria
Janos L. Urai
Geologie - Endogene Dynamik
RWTH Aachen
Lochnerstrasse 4-20
D-52056 Aachen, Gennany
Text Editing and Layout:
Wouter van der Zee
Geologie - Endogene Dynamik
RWTH Aachen
Lochnerstrasse 4-20
D-52056 Aachen, Gennany
ISBN 3-540-65708-8 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York
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Aspects of tectonic faulting: in honour of Georg MandllF. K. Lehner; J. L. Urai (ed.). - Berlin; Heidelberg; New
York; Barcelona; Hong Kong; London; Milan; Paris; Singapore; Tokyo: Springer, 2000
ISBN 3-540-65708-8
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Cover photo: Segmented normal fault in a sand-day layered sequence near Miri, Sarawak Malaysia. (photo by
Wouter van der Zee).
Typesetting: Camera ready by W. van der Zee
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Editors' Preface
This Volume brings together twelve contributions to a symposium held in hon
our of GEORG MANDL at the University of Graz, Austria on December 1-2,
1995, in the year of his 70th anniversary. It is a tribute to a formidable scientist
colleague and friend and a gift of gratitude to an inspiring leader and great in
stigator. A man, who began as a theoretical physicist, made fundamental contri
butions to the theory of transport processes in porous media and the mechanics
of granular materials, but in his forties turned to structural geology and the me
chanics of tectonic faulting - a subject that has since remained at the center of
his interests and the understanding of which was substantially advanced by
Georg Mandl's work. In addressing different aspects of tectonic faulting, mostly
if not entirely from a theoretician's or modeler's point of view, the contribu
tions to this Volume reveal some of the astonishing richness of the subject, the
corresponding diversity in approaches and also challenges that lie ahead. They
aptly evoke the broad scientific culture brought by Georg Mandl to the study
of his favourite subject, a culture he had acquired in the course of a career in a
nowadays rare environment of industrial research and which interested readers
will find sketched in the Biographical Note included in this Volume. As such,
as well as in their own right, the papers contributed to this Festschrift should
be of interest to a wider community of Earth scientists.
As Editors, we wish to thank all contributors for their participation in this
project, with special appreciation of patience displayed in coping with certain
'rate-controlling steps'.
Our thanks go to Professor Eckart Wallbrecher and Professor Gunter Ried
muller and to their staff for providing financial support and for preparing and
hosting the Symposium. Wouter van der Zee has produced a camera-ready copy
of the book and for this we owe him a special word of gratitude. Finally, we
gratefully acknowledge the generous support given to this project by the man
agement of the Shell International Exploration & Production at Rijswijk, The
Netherlands.
F. K. LEHNER 1. L. URAl
GEORG MANDL
Biographical Note
GEORG MANDL was born on the 27th of July 1925 in Feldkirch in Vorarlberg,
Austria, as the first of the three sons of Dr. Georg and Franziska Mandl. His
father was a lawyer, who carne from a Viennese family and moved to Feld
kirch, the home of Georg's mother. Georg and his brothers enjoyed a comforta
ble and protected childhood in the private quarters of a hotel inherited and
managed by his mother.
Georg appears to have had an early interest in biology, but, in his own
words: "no interest at all in geography and maps", a preference, it seems, for
exploring the inner workings of things and little interest in mere "topographic
facts". The intellectually formative years of upper high school at the 400 years
old Gymnasium at Feldkirch were enriched by his close friendship with Werner
Greub, the future renowned algebraist. In the exchanges with his friend, Georg
appears to have recognized and defined his preference for natural philosophy.
While his friend was to enrich its language - mathematics - he would use the
same language to formulate and discover hitherto unknown relations among na
ture's objects. "Coming to grips with things" became Georg's challenge, begin
ning with the catching of bats in Feldkirch's old bell tower in a manner that is
said to have been admired by his mathematical friend.
Georg's childhood and youth coincided with the dramatic second half of the
short-lived first Austrian Republic and the second World war. Having earned
the Matura at the natural sciences branch of the Feldkirch Gymnasium in 1943,
he was drafted in 1944 to serve in a radio communication unit of the Wehr
macht. At a critical moment, he fell ill with Hepatitis and on being temporarily
discharged from service, he saluted his captain with a rather daring, Austrian
style "Habe die Ehre!" (I have the honour) that left little doubt as to where he
stood.
Georg entered the University of Innsbruck to study theoretical physics in the
Spring of 1946, but after a semester he moved to Vienna, where H. Thirring,
W. Glaser and J. Radon were his teachers in theoretical physics and mathe
matics. He completed his studies in 1951 and wrote his doctoral dissertation on
"The Foundation of Geometrical Optics on Maxwell's Field Theory". From
1953 to 1954 Georg worked for Siemens & Halske as a project engineer for
control systems, while looking for a position elsewhere in research. For a
young Austrian physicist in those days this also meant to consider going
abroad. The opportunity to do so arose for Georg and Berta Unterberger in
1954 on the very day of their wedding, when, on a recommendation by Profes
sor van der Waerden of ETH Zurich, Georg was offered a position as a re
search physicist in the Koninklijke Shell Laboratorium Amsterdam. Georg and
Berta moved to Amsterdam, for Georg the start of a long and fruitful career as
a scientist with Shell Research and for the young couple the beginning of a
cosmopolitan life. Holland and the open and informal way of its friendly peo-
VIII Biographical Note
pie appealed to them. They soon founded a circle of friends for a lifetime and
acquired the impeccable Dutch that Georg loves to embellish with colourful ex
amples of its rich treasure of proverbs and sayings. He was to be outdone in
this only by his daughter Barbara, who was born and raised in Holland and
who shares many of her father's tastes and interests, later becoming ,a theoreti
cal physicist herself.
The Koninklijke/Shell Laboratorium Amsterdam, also known as KSLA, and
its mathematics and theoretical physics department, headed by Professor Oos
terhof at the time of Georg Mandl's entry, went through a golden age in the fif
ties and early sixties. It owed its outstanding reputation to a tradition in which
staff members and managers alike were accomplished scientists with close links
to academia, indeed often holding professorships in nearby universities. An
important area of research was the theory of transport processes in porous
materials, on which Georg set out to work. Apart from his theoretical collea
gues, among whom were H. Beckers, H.C. Brinckman, J.H. Kruizinga, and
H.J. Merck, Georg also encountered an exceptionally strong group involved in
the study of hydrocarbon recovery processes, including D.N. Dietz,
L.J. Klinkenberg, P. van Meurs, C. van der Poel and others, whose work had
an enormous impact on the field and advanced the practice of petroleum reser
voir engineering decisively. As one of Georg's early contributions to this area,
one finds - rather fittingly - a derivation of Darcy's Law from the Stokes
Equations, unfortunately published only in abstract form. The actual report in
volved the use of the so-called 'averaging theorem' and emphasized the fact
that in the course of such a 'derivation' of Darcy's Law one had to invoke cer
tain statistical properties of a porous medium, the precise geometrical nature of
which was typically left unspecified, except for assuming it to be of such a
kind as to justify the neglect of certain correlation terms in the averaged,
macroscopic equations of motion. In a major publication from that period, co
authored by G. Mandl and J.H. Kruizinga, the theory of immiscible two-phase
flow through a porous medium was developed in a very complete manner, em
ploying the method of characteristics, and providing experimental evidence of
the predicted spontaneous appearance of saturation jumps.
In 1960 Georg and many of his colleagues moved from Amsterdam to Rijs
wijk near The Hague into the newly founded Koninklijke/Shell Exploratie en
Produktie Laboratorium (KSEPL), which was to focus on R&D related to
Shell's upstream activities. At Rijswijk, the group working on oil recovery pro
cesses under the leadership of J. van Heiningen embarked on a very compre
hensive and ambitious programme of research. Scaled physical analogue experi
ments on model oil fields were the principal tool for studying oil recovery pro
cesses in these days. Unlike their modem digital counterparts, these analogue
computers provided an excellent opportunity for young investigators to acquire
physical insight and build intuition. Steam injection was considered an effec
tive way to accelerate and enhance recovery from heavy-oil reservoirs; the
'steam drive' process was soon to be tested in the Dutch Schoonebeek field
and 'steam soak' stimulation was applied on a large scale in Venezuela. These
engineering developments prompted Georg to continue his collaboration with
Biographical Note IX
Jan Kruizinga, now on the theory of heat and mass transport in steam-drive
processes. Their work provided an elegant quantitative description of a steam
zone advancing through a porous formation.
In 1963 Georg moved to the Shell Bellaire Research Laboratories in Hous
ton, Texas, as an exchange scientist under Shell's internal 'sabbatical leave'
program, which was developed to promote the communication between US and
European research staff. The two years at Houston turned out to be tremen
dously stimulating for Georg and had a decisive influence on his career.
Among other things in his luggage, he carried his work on steam drive pro
cesses and set out to improve on that theory, testing it against an impressive set
of experiments that were performed by his new colleague Charley Volek. Their
joint paper, published in the SPE Journal, became a milestone in the field of
heat and mass transfer processes in porous media.
While still at Rijswijk, Georg had already turned to problems of coupled
flow and deformation in porous geological materials. In a careful micromechan
ical analysis, building upon earlier work of Terzaghi and Heinrich & Desoyer
and published 1964, he clarified the significance of different macroscopic stress
concepts and the role - if any - of buoyancy effects in porous media. The
Houston interlude could not have come at a better moment for Georg. While
enjoying the academic priviledges of a member of the theoretical department
headed by A. Ginzburg, he found himself next-door to John Handin's outstand
ing experimental rock mechanics group and, even more important, he also found
an interest in quantitative models of geological structures among structural
geologists, nurtured by their former director M. King Hubbert. A true pioneer
of this new trend at the Bellair lab was Helmer Ode, author of a number of highly
influencial papers on the theory of faulting and on folding of stratified viscoelastic
layers, and collaborator on a theory of gravity instabilities in two-layer salt!
overburden systems with Maurice Biot who at that time worked as a consultant
for Shell. Ode had documented the application of various branches of solid
mechanics to problems in structural geology in a number of reports that were
written in a scholarly style. To a mature theoretician, the clear message to be read
from these reports was however that comparatively little had been accomplished
so far and that much more remained to be done in this field.
Helmer Ode's message appears to have been received by Georg with great
enthusiasm. Field trips to the Rocky Mountains were arranged to "discover the
boundary conditions". What he saw, was simply awsome to a theoretical physi
cists mind. Mere facts and "topography" on one hand and key observations, re
vealing the truth of or refuting some conjectured mechanism on the other:
where was the dividing line? Obviously, field trips had to be taken only now
and then, to avoid confusion ...
Upon returning to The Netherlands and KSEPL, Georg was asked by its di
rector J. van Heiningen to set up a research section within the Geology Depart
ment, named Geomechanics - Structural Geology. The work of this new group
was to advance the quantitative, mechanical understanding of geological pro
cesses and structures relevant to the exploration and production of hydrocar
bons. This project was to become Georg Mandl's unique contribution to a now
X Biographical Note
vanished industrial research culture, promoted and supported by a generation of
farsighted research directors for almost twenty years until 1984, when Georg
retired from his duties as section head in order to concentrate on the writing of
his "Mechanics of Tectonic Faulting". This book can be read as an account of
the major accomplishments of Georg's group over the years. It also puts on re
cord a level of competence and understanding that was attained by its members
and was communicated to structural geologists throughout Shell by means of a
continuing education system.
The title of Georg's book reflects the early choice of a main theme for his
group. In the beginning, questions concerning the theoretical foundations of a
theory of frictional plasticity stood in the foreground, especially questions con
cerning the kinematics of frictional plastic flow which bears directly on the ge
ometry of faults, when these are seen as velocity discontinuities. These prob
lems were addressed in a characteristically thorough theoretical study, coau
thored by R. Fernandez-Luque, who had become interested in the micromecha
nics of granular materials. Also in this first period belongs the now classical
experimental investigation, with L.N.J. de Jong and A. Maltha, into the me
chanics and structural evolution of shear zones in granular materials. For the
first time, a number of characteristics of tectonic shear zones were observed un
der controlled conditions in a large ring-shear apparatus. Focussing on the role
of faults in hydrocarbon migration and trapping, the evolution of fault zone hy
draulic properties was investigated experimentally in the same apparatus, while
simultaneously undertaken field studies produced valuable insights into the ori
gin of clay smears in synsedimentary faults. The frequent field trips to fault ex
posures that were undertaken by Georg's group in those days were usually pre
pared for by R. Spijer, senior and for a while only geologist in the group, and
its "scientific censor". Bob Spijer's sharp and witty contributions to the on
going process of conjecture and refutation, which tended to emphasize the sec
ond, was the kind of "needling" that Georg must have found stimulating, since
he always enjoyed it and continues to do so. Bob would return from a "vaca
tion in the Haselgebirge", to pull Georg's leg, and Georg was delighted at
being taught stratigraphy in this unforgettable manner.
Next to fundamental studies directed towards a better understanding of fric
tional-plastic material response and related experimental and field work, the nu
merical modeling of tectonic faulting became a major theme of the group. Clas
sical slip-line theory for Coulomb-plastic materials was applied in a series of
papers on the theory of listric growth faults in overpressured sediments with
W. Crans. Work by J.N. Thomas, J.Y. Walters and H.W.M. Witlox on improved
elasto-plastic finite-element schemes resulted in some of the first numerical
studies of tectonic faulting as a shear localization phenomenon. Efforts in this
direction by members of Georg's section provided a realistic assessment of the
capabilities and potential of finite element modeling in this problem area. They
also prompted a resurrection of sandbox experiments as physical analogue
models of different styles of tectonic faulting. While one had to be mindful of
the fact that not all criteria of similitude of model and prototype were satisfied
in sandbox experiments, the close match of complex natural fault systems and