Seismicity Rate Change as a Tool to Investigate Delayed and Remote Triggering of the 2010–2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence, New Zealand

ABSTRACT Crustal earthquakes in low-strain-rate regions are rare in the human life span but can generate disastrous consequences when they occur. Such was the case in the Canterbury earthquake sequence that began in 2010 and eventually led to almost 200 fatalities. Our study explores this earthquake sequence’s origins by producing an enhanced earthquake catalog in the Canterbury Plains and Otago, South Island, New Zealand. We investigate seismicity rate changes from 2005 to before the 2010 Mw 7.2 Darfield earthquake. During this time, major subduction-zone earthquakes, such as the 2009 Mw 7.8 Dusky Sound earthquake, created measurable coseismic and postseismic strain in the region. We use template matching to expand the catalog of earthquakes in the region, and use a support vector machine classifier to remove false positives and poor detections. We then compare the newly obtained seismicity rates with the coseismic and postseismic crustal strain fields, and find that seismicity rate and crustal strain are positively correlated in the low-stress, low-seismicity region of the northern Canterbury Plains. In contrast, near fast-moving plate-boundary faults, the seismicity rate changes rise without much change in the strain rate. Our analysis reveals a substantial seismicity rate decrease in the western rupture area of the Darfield earthquake, which we infer to be an effect of coseismic and postseismic deformation caused by the Dusky Sound earthquake. We show in low-strain-rate regions, stress perturbation of a few kPas creates substantial seismicity rate change. However, the implication that such seismic quiescence is responsible for the nucleation of the Darfield earthquake requires further studies.

Identifying plausible historical scenarios for coupled lake level and seismicity rate changes: The case for the Dead Sea during the last two millennia

Seismicity triggered by water level changes in reservoirs and lakes is usually studied from well-documented contemporary records. Can such triggering be explored on a historical time scale when the data gathered on water level fluctuations in historic lakes and the earthquake catalogs suffer from severe uncertainties? These uncertainties stem from the different nature of the data gathered, methods, and their resolution. In this article, we considerably improve the correlation between the continuous record of historic water level reconstructions at the Dead Sea and discrete seismicity patterns in the area over the period of the past two millennia. Constricted by the data from previous studies, we generate an ensemble of random water level curves and choose that curve that best correlates with the historical records of seismic stress release in the Dead Sea reflected in the destruction in Jerusalem. We then numerically simulate a synthetic earthquake catalog using this curve. The earthquakes of this synthetic catalog show an impressing agreement with historic earthquake records from the field. We demonstrate for the first time that water level changes correlate well with the observed recurrence interval record of historic earthquakes.

Correction to: Stress and pore fluid pressure control of seismicity rate changes following the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake, Japan

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.

Stress and pore fluid pressure control of seismicity rate changes following the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake, Japan Version 2021125

We quantitatively examined the influence of pore fluid pressure and coseismic stress changes on the seismicity rate changes that followed the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake, on the basis of two approaches. One is a numerical calculation of the classic stress metric of ∆CFS, and the other is an inversion analysis of pore fluid pressure fields with earthquake focal mechanism data. The former calculation demonstrated that seismicity rate changes were consistent with the expectation from ∆CFS in 65% of the target region, whereas they were not in the remaining 35% of the region. The latter analysis indicates that seismicity rates increased in the regions where pore fluid pressure before the Kumamoto earthquake sequence was remarkably enhanced above hydrostatic, regardless of values of ΔCFS. This suggests that the increase in pore fluid pressure is one of the important physical mechanisms triggering aftershock generation. We obtained evidence that pore fluid pressure increased around the southern part of the main rupture zone after the mainshock, examining temporal changes in types of focal mechanism data. The average increases in pore fluid pressure were estimated to be 17, 20, and 17 MPa at depths of 5, 10, and 15 km, respectively. These large increases in pore fluid pressure cannot be explained under the undrained condition. The spatial derivative of the pore fluid pressure field in the depth direction implies that fluid supply from greater depths may have controlled increases in seismicity rates that followed the large earthquake.

THE ANALYSIS OF SEISMOTECTONICS, PERIODICITY, AND CHANGING OF QUAKES LEVEL IN WEST NUSA TENGGARA AREA BASED ON 1973 – 2015 DATA

This research was conducted as one of the earthquake disaster mitigation efforts in Nusa Tenggara Barat region, because this region is one of the regions in Indonesia which has a relatively high level of seismicity. The purpose of this research is to determine seismotectonic parameter, earthquake periodicity along with the average of seismicity rate changes in Nusa Tenggara Barat region. The data used in this research is the data sourced from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and Badan Meteorologi Klimatologi dan Geofisika (BMKG) from Januari 1973 until February 2015 for Bali Strait region up to Banda Sea with coordinate boundaries of 1140–1300 East Longitude and 40-130 South Latitude. This research was conducted using the maximum likelihood method with second party of software Zmap ver 6.0 also software ArcGis ver 10 to map seismotectonic parameter, periodicity and the average velocity of seismicity rate changes. Variation b value range between 0.972–1.44, a low value of b are associated with high stress levels, and vice versa. The a value range between 6.67- 9.1, its show that the regions with high a value experience a relatively high earthquake incidence rate, and vice versa. The density of earthquake is about -2.63 to -2.01 logN/km2 or the occurrence of earthquakes in the area is very rare. Earthquake periodicity with magnitude (M) 6 SR is 5 to 18 year, M 6.5 SR is 16 to 67 year, M 7 SR is 54 to 304 year, and M 7.5 SR is 178 to 1.386 year. The average of seismicity rate changes on a case that occurred in Sumbawa in 1982 is more than 125%, meanwhile the earthquake that occurred in 2009 is more than 75%.Copyright © 2019IPR. All rights reserved.