ABSTRACT
The Bureau of Mines is engaged in rock burst prediction and control research. One component of this research is directed toward applying quantitative seismological techniques of waveform analysis to the waveforms of elastic waves generated by microseismic events. This chapter describes the interim-stage methodology and presents an example of its application to a set of microseismic events recorded in a hard-rock mine in northern Idaho. A pattern recognition technique has been applied to the P-wave polarities of 249 microseismic events from a hard-rock mine, recorded at 11 single-component accelerometers. This technique provided the basis for establishing six groups of events, each group consisting of events that occurred relatively close to other events in the group; had nearly identical P-wave polarity patterns; had similar waveforms; and, therefore, likely had the same focal mechanism.
