PROTEA is an ICDP drilling project in South Africa that aims to reach the heart of the 2014 Orkney earthquake by drilling from a mine site about 3 kilometers underground to the quake’s origin. The plan is to bore through the West Rand Group rocks, including a thick ultramafic lamprophyre dike and its surrounding rock, so scientists can study how rock type, fluid pressure, and stress vary along the fault that produced the quake. By drilling into the nucleation zone and combining core samples with pre- and post-drilling seismic surveys, researchers hope to wire together how the dike-sill complex influences fault behavior during an extensional, crustal rupture and what this tells us about how earthquakes start, grow, and stop. PROTEA also looks at how the rocks change with time, including mineral alteration around the dike, and builds on the earlier DSEIS project. The work aims to illuminate deep Earth processes and improve our understanding of earthquake physics in the region.

Precursor Projects: DAFSAM (2007),  DSEIS (2015)