Revealing 60 years of Earthquake Swarms in the Southern Red Sea, Afar and the Gulf of Aden

Earthquake swarms occur sporadically at divergent plate boundaries but their recurrence over multiple decades and relation to magmatic spreading activity remain poorly understood. Here we study more than 100 earthquake swarms over a 60-year period in the southern Red Sea, Afar, and Gulf of Aden region. We first compiled an earthquake-swarm catalogue by integrating reexamined global and local earthquake catalogues from 1960 to 2017. This yielded 134 earthquake swarms that mainly cluster in 19 different areas in the study region, showing that in most cases swarms recur every few decades in the same area. The swarms exhibit a range of earthquake magnitudes and often include multiple M3 to M5 events with some swarms having occasional larger earthquakes over M6, primarily in southern Afar. Many of the earthquake swarms were clearly associated with rifting events, consisting of magmatic intrusions, surface faulting, and in some cases volcanic eruptions. Together, the swarms suggest that extension at these divergent plate boundaries occurs episodically along <100 km long segments, some of which were previously unrecognized. Within the study region, the Gulf of Aden shows the most frequent swarm activity, followed by Afar and then the southern Red Sea. The results show that the three areas were subject to an increase of earthquake-swarm activity from 2003 to 2013 in the form of three rifting episodes and at least seven volcanic eruptions. We interpret that the most likely controls on temporal variations in earthquake swarm activity are either temporal variations in magma supply, or rifting-induced stress change that trigger clusters of swarms.

Migration diffusivity as a controlling factor in the duration of earthquake swarms

Earthquake swarms exhibit highly uncertain temporal behavior. We investigated the relationship between the swarm duration and the diffusivity of hypocenter migration for triggered earthquake swarms in northeastern Japan. These parameters were systematically estimated by applying a diffusion model and using a unified definition of time windows for the initial and final stages of swarm activity. This approach detected a clear negative correlation between the diffusivity and swarm durations. The relation follows a power-law with an exponent of $$-\,0.5$$ - 0.5 to $$-\,1.0$$ - 1.0 . Examination of published data confirmed that this relationship globally holds under various localities and tectonic environments. These results suggest that diffusivity, and by extension, crustal permeability and fluid viscosity play a key role in controlling the duration of the fluid-driven swarms.

Statistical analysis of tidal effect on non-volcanic earthquake swarm activity in Wakayama Prefecture, southwest Japan

<p>Earthquakes occur when the fault stress accumulates to the critical level. External forces such as tidal forces may contributes to the triggering of earthquakes reaching the critical state. For example, in the case of 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, it is reported that there is a correlation between tidal forces and the earthquakes prior to the mainshock. Earthquakes with smaller magnitude are also affected by tidal forces and expected to show correlation with tidal forces.</p><p>Tidal triggering of non-volcanic seismic swarm has not been well documented. So, we choose the Wakayama Prefecture as a targeting region. The cause of the earthquakes occurring in the region is considered to be the presence of the water below the seismogenic depth. The swarm activity continues from 1980s. We analyzed the shallow earthquakes in the northern part of Wakayama Prefecture from 1998 to 2016. We used statistical method called Schuster test to analyze correlation between earthquakes and tidal stress.</p><p>The result of the analysis shows that the earthquakes have a correlation with tidal forces which have the periodicity near the half of the lunar day and the amplitude of the seismicity-rate variation is about 16% of the average earthquake frequency. Correlation between the earthquakes and tidal forces is stronger at the periods when larger number of earthquakes occur. From tidal stress calculation, it is found that both solid tide and oceanic tide are important at this region. This study confirms that most of the earthquakes larger than M<sub>w</sub> 4 in the region occur in the rising period of tidal normal stress or just after the maximum of tidal normal stress. Therefore, tidal observation gives information about the criticality of rocks and temporal heterogeneity of the earthquake occurrence.</p>

Are the recurring earthquake swarms in West-Bohemia rain triggered?

<p>In past decades, a significant effort was spent to find the origin of recurring earthquake swarms in West-Bohemia/Vogtland. Widespread understanding accepts that crustal fluids migration along the fault zones is responsible for earthquake triggering in this area. Recently, a new model was suggested, which tests the hypothesis whether the diffusion of hydraulically induced pore pressure could be a valid trigger mechanism. In this approach the precipitation signal was transformed by diffusion equation to the hypocenter depth and statistically compared with the earthquake occurrence in time and concluded that at least 19% of the seismicity could have been triggered by rain. </p><p>In our study we apply a different approach to verify the validity of these results. We use two types of rain signal on the input which is compared with the time series of earthquake weekly rate for the past 25 years. To remove the strong episodic character of the swarm seismicity we use a declustered seismic catalog, which is characteristic by almost continuous seismic activity.</p><p>The rain signal is represented first by the precipitation data and second by the water level data in the Horka reservoir, which is located above the main focal zone of Nový Kostel. We test the possible relation to the earthquake swarm activity by cross correlating both the rain signal types and the seismicity rate. To amplify the possible seasonal periodicity of the data we stacked the explored time series data (precipitation, water level and seismic activity) according to their occurrence date in a single year. The results show that in any of the input data and seismicity do not correlate. </p><p>In the next step, we tested the possible (annual) periodicity of the data in question by the singular spectral analysis (SSA), which is a sensitive method to identify possible periodic signals in the presence of noise. While the water level data showed a striking peak for the period of 1 year, any indication of annual periodicity was never found in the seismicity data. Accordingly, we conclude that our analysis has shown no influence of the precipitation or the water level fluctuations in the Horka dam to the earthquake swarm activity in West Bohemia/Vogtland.</p>

IoT-Based Bee Swarm Activity Acoustic Classification Using Deep Neural Networks

Animal activity acoustic monitoring is becoming one of the necessary tools in agriculture, including beekeeping. It can assist in the control of beehives in remote locations. It is possible to classify bee swarm activity from audio signals using such approaches. A deep neural networks IoT-based acoustic swarm classification is proposed in this paper. Audio recordings were obtained from the Open Source Beehive project. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients features were extracted from the audio signal. The lossless WAV and lossy MP3 audio formats were compared for IoT-based solutions. An analysis was made of the impact of the deep neural network parameters on the classification results. The best overall classification accuracy with uncompressed audio was 94.09%, but MP3 compression degraded the DNN accuracy by over 10%. The evaluation of the proposed deep neural networks IoT-based bee activity acoustic classification showed improved results if compared to the previous hidden Markov models system.

3-D Geoelectrical Characterisation of the Central Volcanoes of São Miguel Island (Azores Archipelago, Portugal) using Broad-Band Magnetotelluric Data

<p>The Azores islands are located at the triple junction between the North American, Eurasian and African plates. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge separates the North America from Eurasia and African plates, while Azores-Gibraltar Fracture Zone is the boundary between Eurasia and African plates. São Miguel Island, situated at the southeastern part of the western segment of the Azores-Gibraltar Fracture Zone, has three active strato-volcanoes, Sete Cidades, Fogo (Água de Pau), and Furnas. At Furnas and Fogo volcanoes, intense circulation of volcanic fluids at depth leads to high CO<sub>2</sub> outgassing and flank destabilisation, whereas its neighbour Congro Fissural volcanic system, located between Fogo and Furnas volcanoes, experiences significant seismic swarm activity and poses considerable threat to the local population. Enhanced electrical conductivity values are typically associated with volcanic-hydrothermal systems and the modelled conductivity structures can provide constraints on these volcanic and hydrothermal processes.</p><p>Our previous work on Furnas volcano, which yielded a revised conceptual model developed from 39 high-frequency magnetotelluric soundings that imaged the hydrothermal system of the volcano to a depth of 1 km directly beneath the caldera, has now been expanded to include 35 additional broad-band magnetotelluric soundings from a recent field campaign conducted in late 2018, to image deeper and broader to gain new insights into the regional context of the Furnas volcanic system. The resistivity model of Furnas shallow hydrothermal system constructed from high-frequency dataset delineated two enhanced conductive zones, one at 100 m and another at 500 m depth, separated by a resistive layer. The shallow conductor has conductivity less than 1 S/m, which can be explained by clay mineral surface conduction with a mass fraction of at least 20% smectite. The deeper conductor extends across the majority of the survey area and is located at depths where smectite is generally not formed. We interpret this as the result of saline aqueous fluids near the boiling point, inferring temperatures of at least 240 <sup>o</sup>C. The less conductive layer found between these conductors is interpreted to be steam-dominated and coincides within the mixed-clay zone found in many volcanic hydrothermal systems. 3-D inversions using the deep-probing data indicate continuation of a strong conductive zone towards the south, beneath the 1630 Dome, which represents the most recent phase of eruptive activity in the multi-caldera complex. During the 2018 field campaign, we have enlarged our study to include 50 broad-band soundings on the adjacent Fogo (Água de Pau) volcano and Congro Fissural volcanic system. The Fogo-Congro region is subjected to seismic swarm activity and its relationship with the geoelectrical structure is being investigated.</p>