Searching for hidden earthquakes in Southern California
Using earthquakes to find earthquakes
Earthquake catalogs elucidate the behavior of faults and allow for rough estimates of when large earthquakes might occur. Cataloging small earthquakes is challenging because the small signal is often indistinguishable from noise. Ross et al. used a template-matching algorithm to find almost two million tiny earthquakes previously missed by other earthquake-logging techniques in Southern California (see the Perspective by Brodsky). This more-complete catalog can be used to better understand faults, earthquake reoccurrence, and other geophysical processes.
Abstract
Earthquakes follow a well-known power-law size relation, with smaller events occurring much more often than larger events. Earthquake catalogs are thus dominated by small earthquakes yet are still missing a much larger number of even smaller events because of signal fidelity issues. To overcome these limitations, we applied a template-matching detection technique to the entire waveform archive of the regional seismic network in Southern California. This effort resulted in a catalog with 1.81 million earthquakes, a 10-fold increase, which provides important insights into the geometry of fault zones at depth, foreshock behavior and nucleation processes, and earthquake-triggering mechanisms. The rich detail resolved in this type of catalog will facilitate the next generation of analyses of earthquakes and faults.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Materials and Methods
Supplementary Text
Figs. S1 to S9
Resources
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Science
Volume 364 • Issue 6442 • 24 May 2019
Pages: 767 - 771
History
Received: 16 January 2019
Accepted: 9 April 2019
18 April 2019
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
Authors
Funding Information
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001National Science Foundation: EAR-1550704
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001National Science Foundation: EAR-1818582
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000203U.S. Geological Survey: G18AP00028
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100008902Los Alamos National Laboratory:
