Earthquake clusters expected from bare statistics: How bursts and swarms emerge from exogenous and epidemic aftershock processes.

<p>Earthquake catalogs exhibit strong spatio-temporal correlations. As such, earthquakes are often classified into clusters of correlated activity. Clusters themselves are traditionally classified in two different kinds: (i) bursts, with a clear hierarchical structure between a single strong mainshock, preceded by a few foreshocks and followed by a power-law decaying aftershock sequence, and (ii) swarms, exhibiting a non-trivial activity rate that cannot be reduced to such a simple hierarchy between events. </p><p>The Epidemic Aftershock Sequence (ETAS) model is a linear Hawkes point process able to reproduce earthquake clusters from empirical statistical laws [Ogata, 1998]. Although not always explicit, the ETAS model is often interpreted as the outcome of a background activity driven by external forces and a Galton-Watson branching process with one-to-one causal links between events [Saichev et al., 2005]. Declustering techniques based on field observations [Baiesi & Paczuski, 2004] can be used to infer the most likely causal links between events in a cluster. Following this method, Zaliapin and Ben‐Zion (2013) determined the statistical properties of earthquake clusters characterizing bursts and swarms, finding a relationship between the predominant cluster-class and the heat flow in seismic regions.</p><p>Here, I show how the statistical properties of clusters are related to the fundamental statistics of the underlying seismogenic process, modeled in two point-process paradigms [Baró, 2020].</p><p>The classification of clusters into bursts and swarms appears naturally in the standard ETAS model with homogeneous rates and are determined by the average branching ratio (nb) and the ratio between exponents α and b characterizing the production of aftershocks and the distribution of magnitudes, respectively. The scale-free ETAS model, equivalent to the BASS model [Turcotte, et al., 2007], and usual in cold active tectonic regions, is imposed by α=b and reproduces bursts. In contrast, by imposing α<0.5b, we recover the properties of swarms, characteristic of regions with high heat flow. </p><p>Alternatively, the same declustering methodology applied to a non-homogeneous Poisson process with a non-factorizable intensity, i.e. in absence of causal links, recovers swarms with α=0, i.e. a Poisson Galton-Watson process, with similar statistical properties to the ETAS model in the regime α<0.5b.</p><p>Therefore, while bursts are likely to represent actual causal links between events, swarms can either denote causal links with low α/b ratio or variations of the background rate caused by exogenous processes introducing local and transient stress changes. Furthermore, the redundancy in the statistical laws can be used to test the hypotheses posed by the ETAS model as a memory‐less branching process. </p><p>References:</p><ul><li> <p>Baiesi, M., & Paczuski, M. (2004). <em>Physical Review E</em>, 69, 66,106. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.69.066106.</p> </li> <li> <p>Baró, J. (2020).  <em>Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth,</em> 125, e2019JB018530. doi:10.1029/2019JB018530.</p> </li> <li> <p>Ogata, Y. (1998) <em>Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics,</em> 50(2), 379–402. doi:10.1023/A:1003403601725.</p> </li> <li> <p>Saichev, A., Helmstetter, A. & Sornette, D. (2005) <em>Pure appl. geophys.</em> 162, 1113–1134. doi:10.1007/s00024-004-2663-6.</p> </li> <li> <p>Turcotte, D. L., Holliday, J. R., and Rundle, J. B. (2007), <em>Geophys. Res. Lett.</em>, 34, L12303, doi:10.1029/2007GL029696.</p> </li> <li> <p>Zaliapin, I., and Ben‐Zion, Y. (2013), <em>J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth</em>, 118, 2865– 2877, doi:10.1002/jgrb.50178.</p> </li> </ul>

Earthquake Cluster Analysis with Nearest Neighbor Approach in Taiwan

<p>Spatiotemporal evolution of earthquake clusters can give insights into fault geometry, triggering process, and potential interaction with fluid and heat. Taiwan is one of the most active orogenic belts with high deformation rate and complex crustal structures, so it is expected to observe seismicity driven by varying mechanisms among different geological processes. For investigating the tectonic complexity and the triggering processes of seismicity in Taiwan, a high-quality and robust catalog of earthquake clusters is critical. This study collected a long-term-effort earthquake catalog from the Central Weather Bureau from 1990/01 to 2018/06 and produced the earthquake cluster and background seismicity catalogs by four different declustering methods. Among which, the statistics-based nearest neighbor approach (NNA) performs most desirably for passing the Poisson process statistic tests while also remaining more events. We further classified the extracted earthquake clusters into the typical mainshock-aftershock (M-A) sequences and the swarms. Most of the M-A sequences are distributed near the Western Foothill. The asperity sizes, duration, and cluster event numbers all show positive correlations with mainshock magnitude. In contrast, the swarms are mainly distributed in the northern and southern Central Range and the northern Hualien regions. The lower correlation of the asperity sizes, duration, and swarm event numbers with the mainshock magnitude is showed in swarms. Moreover, we find that some of the swarm may be driven by fluid diffusion and spatial correlated with the high heat flow and spring regions.</p>

Τhe February-March 2019 Seismic Swarm Offshore North Lefkada Island, Greece: Microseismicity Analysis and Geodynamic Implications

A quite energetic seismic excitation consisting of one main and three additional distinctive earthquake clusters that occurred in the transition area between the Kefalonia Transform Fault Zone (KTFZ) and the continental collision between the Adriatic and Aegean microplates is thoroughly studied after the high-precision aftershocks’ relocation. The activated fault segments are in an area where historical and instrumental data have never claimed the occurrence of a catastrophic (M ≥ 6.0) earthquake. The relocated seismicity initially defines an activated structure extending from the northern segment of the Lefkada branch of KTFZ with the same NNE–SSW orientation and dextral strike slip faulting, and then keeping the same sense of motion, its strike becomes NE–SW and its dip direction NW. This provides unprecedented information on the link between the KTFZ and the collision front and sheds more light on the regional geodynamics. The earthquake catalog, which was especially compiled for this study, starts one year before the occurrence of the Mw5.4 main shock, and adequately provides the proper data source for investigating the temporal variation in the b value, which might be used for discriminating foreshock and aftershock behavior.

Τhe February – March 2019 Seismic Swarm Offshore North Lefkada Island, Greece: Microseismicity Analysis and Geodynamic Implications

A quite energetic seismic excitation consisting of one main and additional three distinctive earthquake clusters that occurred in the transition area between the Kefalonia Transform Fault Zone (KTFZ) and the continental collision between Adriatic and Aegean microplates, is thoroughly studied after high–precision aftershocks’ relocation. The activated fault segments are in an area where historical and instrumental data have never claimed the occurrence of a catastrophic (M>6.0) earthquake. The relocated seismicity initially defines an activated structure extending from the northern segment of the Lefkada branch of KTFZ with the same NNE–SSW orientation and dextral strike-slip faulting and then keeping the same sense of motion its strike becomes NE–SW and its dip direction NW. This provides unprecedented information on the link between the KTFZ and the Collision front and sheds more light on the regional geodynamics. The earthquake catalog, which is specially compiled for this study, starts one year before the occurrence of the Mw5.4 mainshock and adequately provides the proper data source for investigating the temporal variation of the b–value, which might be used for discriminating foreshock and aftershock behavior.

Seismotectonic setting of Santorini-Amorgos zone and the surrounding area revealed from crustal earthquakes relocation and Vp/Vs distribution

<p>The Santorini-Amorgos zone represents right-lateral transtensional regime from NE of Santorini to the south of Amorgos which also hosts Kolumbo submarine volcano. A total number of 1869 crustal events from 2002 to 2019 were recorded by permanent and temporal seismic networks deployed in southern Aegean. Absolute locations of these events were obtained by utilizing the probabilistic nonlinear algorithm NonLinLoc. Precise relative relocation by using double-difference algorithm with catalog and cross-correlation differential times was later performed, resulting in 1455 locations with horizontal and vertical uncertainties of less than 0.3 km. Clusters of earthquakes relocated between Naxos and Paros as well as north of Astypalaia do not coincide with any fault in the area. Similarly, the relocated crustal events across Santorini-Amorgos zone show that most of the earthquake clusters do not coincide with any of the existing faults. The distribution of Vp/Vs ratios in the area were investigated based on the P and S-wave travel times of all the events. Vp/Vs ratios in the area vary between 1.67 and 2.03 with errors less than 0.04. The highest Vp/Vs values were found to be distributed in the area between Naxos and Paros. Other areas with notably high Vp/Vs ratio are north of Santorini, Anydros, west of Amorgos, offshore area south of the easternmost tip of Amorgos, and the island of Astypalaia. These mentioned areas were also rich in seismic activities during the period of study. The high Vp/Vs ratios in the region of high seismicity signifies that these events were likely related to the migration of magmatic fluids to the surface and may not be caused by the existing faults.</p>