J.L. Rubinstein | Search USGS

USGS2010

Precise estimation of repeating earthquake moment: Example from parkfield, california

We offer a new method for estimating the relative size of repeating earthquakes using the singular value decomposition (SVD). This method takes advantage of the highly coherent waveforms of repeating earthquakes and arrives at far more precise and accurate descriptions of earthquake size than standard catalog techniques allow. We demonstrate that uncertainty in relative moment estimates is reduced from ??75% for standard coda-duration techniques employed by the network to an uncertainty of ??6.6% when the SVD method is used. This implies that a single-station estimate of moment using the SVD method has far less uncertainty than the whole-network estimates of moment based on coda duration. The SVD method offers a significant improvement in our ability to describe the size of repeating earthquakes and thus an opportunity to better understand how they accommodate slip as a function of time.

Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America↗

USGS2007

Non-volcanic tremor driven by large transient shear stresses

Non-impulsive seismic radiation or 'tremor' has long been observed at volcanoes and more recently around subduction zones. Although the number of observations of non-volcanic tremor is steadily increasing, the causative mechanism remains unclear. Some have attributed non-volcanic tremor to the movement of fluids, while its coincidence with geodetically observed slow-slip events at regular intervals has led others to consider slip on the plate interface as its cause. Low-frequency earthquakes in Japan, which are believed to make up at least part of non-volcanic tremor, have focal mechanisms and locations that are consistent with tremor being generated by shear slip on the subduction interface. In Cascadia, however, tremor locations appear to be more distributed in depth than in Japan, making them harder to reconcile with a plate interface shear-slip model. Here we identify bursts of tremor that radiated from the Cascadia subduction zone near Vancouver Island, Canada, during the strongest shaking from the moment magnitude Mw = 7.8, 2002 Denali, Alaska, earthquake. Tremor occurs when the Love wave displacements are to the southwest (the direction of plate convergence of the overriding plate), implying that the Love waves trigger the tremor. We show that these displacements correspond to shear stresses of approximately 40 kPa on the plate interface, which suggests that the effective stress on the plate interface is very low. These observations indicate that tremor and possibly slow slip can be instantaneously induced by shear stress increases on the subduction interface - effectively a frictional failure response to the driving stress. ??2007 Nature Publishing Group.

Nature↗