Volcanic arc rigidity variations illuminated by coseismic deformation of the 2011 Tohoku-oki M9

Creators: Puel, Simone^{1, 2}; Becker, Thorsten W.¹; Villa, Umberto¹; Ghattas, Omar¹; Liu, Dunyu¹

1. The University of Texas at Austin
2. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Rock strength has long been linked to lithospheric deformation and seismicity. However, independent constraints on the related elastic heterogeneity are missing, yet could provide key information for solid Earth dynamics. Using coseismic Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) data for the 2011 M9 Tohoku-oki earthquake in Japan, we apply an inverse method to infer elastic structure and fault slip simultaneously. We find compliant material beneath the volcanic arc and in the mantle wedge within the partial melt generation zone inferred to lie above ~100 km slab depth. We also identify low-rigidity material closer to the trench matching seismicity patterns, likely associated with accretionary wedge structure. Along with traditional seismic and electromagnetic methods, our approach opens up avenues for multiphysics inversions. Those have the potential to advance earthquake and volcano science, and in particular once expanded to InSAR type constraints, may lead to a better understanding of transient lithospheric deformation across scales.

Copyright and License

© 2024 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY).

Acknowledgement

We thank J. Hua, L. Wallace, and D. Saffer for the helpful and insightful discussions and the anonymous reviewers for the helpful comments and suggestions to improve the readability of the manuscript.

Funding

S.P., T.W.B., and D.L. are supported by the NSF, Division of Earth Sciences (EAR), grants 2121666, 2045292, 19214743, and 1927216. U.V. and O.G. are supported by the NSF, Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Division, under the grant 1550593 and by the Department of Energy, Advanced Scientific Computing Research program (ASCR), under the grants DE-SC0019303, DE-SC0023171, and DE-SC0021239.

Contributions

All authors made substantial contributions to the work presented in this manuscript. S.P., T.W.B., and O.G. designed the experiment. S.P. performed the 3D forward simulations and inversions. S.P. and T.W.B. wrote the original draft and created the figures and the Supplementary Materials. U.V. and D.L. helped with code development. All authors provided feedback and suggestions to improve the manuscript.

Data Availability

Coseismic geodetic data are the same as Hashima et al. (24). We used the open-source libraries FENICS-2019.1.0 and HIPPYLIB-3.0.0 to compute all the results in this study. These libraries can be downloaded at https://fenicsproject.org and https://hippylib.github.io, respectively. The unstructured mesh for the finite-element computations was generated using the open-source software GMSH. All data, including the 3D mesh, and numerical codes necessary to reproduce the results, are available to readers in the Zenodo repository at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10909935. All other data needed to evaluate the conclusions of the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials.

Supplemental Material

Supplementary Materials: Figs. S1 to S10; Table S1 (PDF)

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