Published April 22, 2016 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

The evolving interaction of low-frequency earthquakes during transient slip

Abstract

Observed along the roots of seismogenic faults where the locked interface transitions to a stably sliding one, low-frequency earthquakes (LFEs) primarily occur as event bursts during slow slip. Using an event catalog from Guerrero, Mexico, we employ a statistical analysis to consider the sequence of LFEs at a single asperity as a point process, and deduce the level of time clustering from the shape of its autocorrelation function. We show that while the plate interface remains locked, LFEs behave as a simple Poisson process, whereas they become strongly clustered in time during even the smallest slow slip, consistent with interaction between different LFE sources. Our results demonstrate that bursts of LFEs can result from the collective behavior of asperities whose interaction depends on the state of the fault interface.

Additional Information

© 2016 The Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Submitted 11 November 2015; Accepted 28 March 2016; Published 22 April 2016. Numerical computations were performed on the S-CAPAD platform, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP), France. We thank M. Radiguet for the inter–slow-slip coupling data. We also thank Y. Ben-Zion, D. Zigone, J.-P. Ampuero, P. Johnson, and C. Narteau for discussions that improved this manuscript. This work was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France) under contract RA0000CO69 (G-GAP), the DataScale project, and the LabEx UnivEarthS, by the European Research Council under contract FP7 ERC advanced grant 227507 (WHISPER), by PAPIIT IN110514 and CONACYT 178058 (Mexico), and by the Russian Science Foundation (grant 14-47-00002). Author contributions: W.B.F. and N.M.S. performed the clustering analyses. A.A.G. inspired the point process–based methodology. All authors participated in discussing and writing the manuscript. The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. Additional data related to this paper may be requested from the authors.

Attached Files

Published - e1501616.full.pdf

Supplemental Material - 1501616_SM.pdf

Files

1501616_SM.pdf
Files (9.1 MB)
Name Size Download all
md5:f5a7c279306aee21691af3d6eed621d3
6.9 MB Preview Download
md5:b2df269e26ce17675ad786be3dbbea77
2.2 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023