Inversion of the body waves from the Borrego Mountain earthquake to the source mechanism

Abstract

The generalized linear inverse technique has been adapted to the problem of determining an earthquake source model from body-wave data. The technique has been successfully applied to the Borrego Mountain earthquake of April 9, 1968. Synthetic seismograms computed from the resulting model match in close detail the first 25 sec of long-period seismograms from a wide range of azimuths. The main shock source-time function has been determined by a new simultaneous short period-long period deconvolution technique as well as by the inversion technique. The duration and shape of this time function indicate that most of the body-wave energy was radiated from a surface with effective radius of only 8 km. This is much smaller than the total surface rupture length or the length of the aftershock zone. Along with the moment determination of M_o = 11.2 × 10^(25) dyne-cm, this radius implies a high stress drop of about 96 bars. Evidence in the amplitude data indicates that the polarization angle of shear waves is very sensitive to lateral structure.