Subtle shifts in the Earth could forecast earthquakes, tsunamis

University of South Florida graduate student Denis Voytenko prepares a GPS unit for a high-precision geodetic measurement.
Credit: Jacob Richardson

Earthquakes and tsunamis can be giant disasters no one sees coming, but now an international team of scientists led by a University of South Florida professor has found that subtle shifts in Earth's offshore plates can be a harbinger of the size of the disaster.

In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USF geologist Tim Dixon and the team report that a geological phenomenon called "slow slip events" identified just 15 years ago is a useful tool in identifying the precursors to major earthquakes and the resulting tsunamis. The scientists used high precision GPS to measure the slight shifts on a fault line in Costa Rica, and say better monitoring of these small events can lead to better understanding of maximum earthquake size and tsunami risk.

"Giant earthquakes and tsunamis in the last decade -- Sumatra in 2004 and Japan in 2011 -- are a reminder that our ability to forecast these destructive events is painfully weak," Dixon said.

Dixon was involved in the development of high precision GPS for geophysical applications, and has been making GPS measurements in Costa Rica since 1988, in collaboration with scientists at Observatorio Vulcanológico y Sismológico de Costa Rica, the University of California-Santa Cruz, and Georgia Tech. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Slow slip events have some similarities to earthquakes (caused by motion on faults) but release their energy slowly, over weeks or months, and cannot be felt or even recorded by conventional seismographs, Dixon said. Their discovery in 2001 by Canadian scientist Herb Dragert at the Pacific Geoscience Center had to await the development of high precision GPS, which is capable of measuring subtle movements of the Earth.

The scientists studied the Sept. 5, 2012 earthquake on the Costa Rica subduction plate boundary, as well as motions of the Earth in the previous decade. High precision GPS recorded numerous slow slip events in the decade leading up to the 2012 earthquake. The scientists made their measurements from a peninsula overlying the shallow portion of a megathrust fault in northwest Costa Rica.

The 7.6-magnitude quake was one of the strongest earthquakes ever to hit the Central American nation and unleased more than 1,600 aftershocks. Marino Protti, one of the authors of the paper and a resident of Costa Rica, has spent more than two decades warning local populations of the likelihood of a major earthquake in their area and recommending enhanced building codes.

A tsunami warning was issued after the quake, but only a small tsunami occurred. The group's finding shed some light on why: slow slip events in the offshore region in the decade leading up to the earthquake may have released much of the stress and strain that would normally occur on the offshore fault.

While the group's findings suggest that slow slip events have limited value in knowing exactly when an earthquake and tsunami will strike, they suggest that these events provide critical hazard assessment information by delineating rupture area and the magnitude and tsunami potential of future earthquakes.

The scientists recommend monitoring slow slip events in order to provide accurate forecasts of earthquake magnitude and tsunami potential.

Source: University of South Florida (USF Health)

Read More

Drilling Into an Active Earthquake Fault in New Zealand

An aerial view of the Alpine Fault at Gaunt Creek, where the Deep Fault Drilling Project is scheduled to begin next month. Three University of Michigan geologists are participating in the $2.5 million international project, which will drill nearly a mile beneath the surface and return rock samples from an active fault known to generate major earthquakes. Credit: Photo by Ben van der Pluijm

Three University of Michigan geologists are participating in an international effort to drill nearly a mile beneath the surface of New Zealand this fall to bring back rock samples from an active fault known to generate major earthquakes.

The goal of the Deep Fault Drilling Project is to better understand earthquake processes by sampling the Alpine Fault, which is expected to trigger a large event in the coming decades.

"We're trying to understand why some faults are more earthquake-prone than others, and that requires fundamental knowledge about the processes at work," said Ben van der Pluijm, the Bruce R. Clark Collegiate Professor of Geology in the U-M Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Van der Pluijm and two of his EES colleagues -- doctoral student Austin Boles and research scientist Anja Schleicher -- are part of the team scheduled to start the two-month drilling project early next month. Schleicher will spend October at the site, and Boles will be there for about six weeks starting in early November.

It will be only the second science project to drill deep into an active earthquake fault and return samples. Several years ago, scientists drilled a nearly 2-mile-deep hole into California's San Andreas Fault. Van der Pluijm was a member of that team, as well.

"I hope we find something different this time, a different rock signature that contrasts with what we saw at the San Andreas," he said.

The goal is to drill 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers) into the 530-mile-long Alpine Fault, which marks the boundary between the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates, on New Zealand's South Island. Though most of the movement along the fault is lateral rather than vertical, the fault is responsible for lifting the Southern Alps, the rugged mountain range featured in the "Lord of the Rings" movies.

Earthquakes occur on the Alpine Fault every 200 to 400 years at magnitudes of 7.5 to 8.0, with an average time between successive large earthquakes of about 330 years. Though earthquakes of that size that originate at shallow depths are capable of tremendous damage, the region is sparsely populated.

The last Alpine Fault quake occurred in 1717, and the probability of another big one occurring there in the next 50 years has been calculated at about 28 percent. So the $2.5 million Deep Fault Drilling Project presents a rare opportunity to collect and analyze samples from a major fault before it breaks.

The task for van der Pluijm and his colleagues is to analyze the possible role of clay minerals and friction melting in the fault zone. Radiometric dating, X-ray studies and isotopic-analysis techniques will be used to determine how much clay is in the rock samples and when those clays formed, as well as the likely source of the water that helped produce them.

"The information we can extract from these clays is remarkably rich," said Boles, who will use data from the New Zealand study in his doctoral dissertation. "These clay minerals are a key tool that we can use to better understand the physical and chemical processes happening in an active fault."

Clay minerals can help reduce friction and heat generation along a fault, lubricating it so that pressure is released through steady, relatively small and nondestructive "creeping" motions rather than the periodic violent jolts known as earthquakes.

Creeping motions were observed along the portion of the San Andreas Fault drilled by scientists several years ago. Temperatures in that fault were relatively low, and clay-rich rocks from the active zone were returned to the surface.

"We think that clays are a significant player in making faults less earthquake-prone," van der Pluijm said. "We know that the section of the Alpine Fault we'll be drilling has a history of producing large earthquakes. So finding little clay and, instead, evidence for frictional melting in the rock would better fit the large-earthquake scenario. That would be a fantastic breakthrough."

In addition to sampling the fault during the two-month drilling program, researchers will install permanent pressure, temperature and seismic-monitoring sensors in the borehole.

The U-M researchers are hoping to obtain a rock sample about the volume of a baseball from deep within the Alpine Fault. That would be plenty to complete their various studies, which are funded by the National Science Foundation and the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program.

"Getting the right samples is more important than the amount," van der Pluijm said. "Returning samples to the surface from depth is always a challenge, but I'm confident that it will work."

Source: University of Michigan

Read More

The New study reconstructs mega-earthquakes timeline in Indian Ocean

UM Rosenstiel School Geologist Kelly Jackson documents sediments deposited by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on the southeastern coast of Sri Lanka. Credit: UM Rosenstiel School

A new study on the frequency of past giant earthquakes in the Indian Ocean region shows that Sri Lanka, and much of the Indian Ocean, is affected by large tsunamis at highly variable intervals, from a few hundred to more than one thousand years. The findings suggest that the accumulation of stress in the region could generate as large, or even larger tsunamis than the one that resulted from the 2004 magnitude-9.2 Sumatra earthquake.


Researchers from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka collected and analyzed 22 sediment cores from Karagan Lagoon, Hambantota in southeastern Sri Lanka, to expand the historical record of giant earthquakes along the Sumatra-Andaman subduction zone, where the Indo-Australian plate and Eurasian plate meet. Using sand deposited in the lagoon during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and seven older paleo-tsunami deposits as proxies for large earthquakes in the region, the scientists reconstructed the timeline for mega-earthquakes along the Indian Ocean's plate boundary from Myanmar to Indonesia, assuming that the tsunamis were all generated by large earthquakes.

"In Sri Lanka, coastal lagoons were inundated by this tsunami and others that occurred over thousands of years," said Gregor Eberli, professor of Marine Geosciences and director of UM's CSL -- Center for Carbonate Research. "These lagoons are ideal repositories for tsunami sand layers because after deposition, the tsunami sands were sealed with mud."

The Dec. 26, 2004 M-9.2 Sumatra earthquake resulted in a trans-oceanic tsunami, with wave heights up to 100 feet (30 meters) in some places, which impacted much of the Indian Ocean region causing widespread damage in southeastern Sri Lanka.

During the a 7,000-year record of Indian Ocean tsunamis preserved in the sediment, the research team found evidence that estimated the time period between consecutive tsunamis from 181 (up to 517) years and 1045 (± 334) years. The longest period was nearly twice the time period prior to the 2004 earthquake.

"These results are very important to better understand the tsunami hazard in Sri Lanka," said Kelly Jackson, UM Rosenstiel School Ph.D. candidate and lead author of the study.

"A scary result is a 1000-year time period without a tsunami, which is nearly twice as long as the lull period prior to the 2004 earthquake," said Falk Amelung, professor of geophysics within the department of Marine Geosciences at the UM Rosenstiel School. "This means that the subduction zone is capable of generating earthquakes almost twice as big as in 2004, although we don't have any evidence yet that this actually happened."

"The 2004 tsunami caught us completely by surprise, although we should have known better because there is a Sri Lankan legend in which the sea came ashore in 200 B.C.," says Chandra Jayasena, a geologist at the University of Peradeniya. "We now need to study other lagoons to further expand the historical record of large tsunami-generating earthquakes in the region and get a better understanding of the earthquake frequency in this highly populated region."

The region's subduction zone exhibits great variability in rupture modes, putting it on the list with the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which stretches from Vancouver Island to northern California and Chile, according to the authors.

Source: University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science

Read More

The Evidence of super-fast deep earthquake: Rare high-speed rupture off Russia and similar phenomena on shallow fault zones

The supershear 2013 Sea of Okhotsk earthquake had similar magnitude and fault geometry as the damaging 1994 Northridge earthquake in California, but a much larger depth and faster rupture speed. The high rupture speed (approximately 8 kilometers per second, or 18,000 miles per hour) away from the hypocenter, shown as the red star, concentrates strong shaking on the "Mach front." Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - San Diego

As scientists learn more about earthquakes that rupture at fault zones near the planet's surface -- and the mechanisms that trigger them -- an even more intriguing earthquake mystery lies deeper in the planet.

Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have discovered the first evidence that deep earthquakes, those breaking at more than 400 kilometers (250 miles) below Earth's surface, can rupture much faster than ordinary earthquakes. The finding gives seismologists new clues about the forces behind deep earthquakes as well as fast-breaking earthquakes that strike near the surface.

Seismologists have documented a handful of these events, in which an earthquake's rupture travels faster than the shear waves of seismic energy that it radiates. These "supershear" earthquakes have rupture speeds of four kilometers per second (an astonishing 9,000 miles per hour) or more.

In a National Science Foundation-funded study reported in the June 11, 2014, issue of the journal Science, Scripps geophysicists Zhongwen Zhan and Peter Shearer of Scripps, along with their colleagues at Caltech, discovered the first deep supershear earthquake while examining the aftershocks of a magnitude 8.3 earthquake on May 24, 2013, in the Sea of Okhotsk off the Russian mainland.
Details of a magnitude 6.7 aftershock of the event captured Zhan's attention. Analyzing data from the IRIS (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology) consortium, which coordinates a global network of seismological instruments, Zhan noted that most seismometers around the world yielded similar records, all suggesting an anomalously short duration for a magnitude 6.7 earthquake.
Data from one seismometer, however, stationed closest to the event in Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, told a different story with intriguing details.

After closely analyzing the data, Zhan not only found that the aftershock ruptured extremely deeply at 640 kilometers (400 miles) below Earth's surface, but its rupture velocity was extraordinary -- about eight kilometers per second (five miles per second), nearly 50 percent faster than the shear wave velocity at that depth.

"For a 6.7 earthquake you would expect a duration of seven to eight seconds, but this one lasted just two seconds," said Shearer, a geophysics professor in the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) at Scripps. "This is the first definitive example of supershear rupture for a deep earthquake since previously supershear ruptures have been documented only for shallow earthquakes."

"This finding will help us understand why deep earthquakes happen," said Zhan. "One quarter of earthquakes occur at large depths, and some of these can be pretty big, but we still don't understand why they happen. So this earthquake provides a new observation for deep earthquakes and high-rupture speeds."

Zhan also believes the new information will be useful in examining ultra-fast earthquakes and their potential for impacting fault zones near Earth's surface. Although not of supershear caliber, California's destructive 1994 Northridge earthquake had a comparable size and geometry to that of the 6.7 Sea of Okhotsk aftershock.

"If a shallow earthquake such as Northridge goes supershear, it could cause even more shaking and possibly more damage," said Zhan.

Source: University of California - San Diego

Read More

The San Francisco's big 1906 earthquake was third of a series on San Andreas Fault

The study was the first to fully map the active fault trace in the Santa Cruz Mountains using a combination of on-the-ground observations and airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), a remote sensing technology. The Santa Cruz Mountains run for about 39 miles from south of San Francisco to near San Juan Batista. Hazel Dell is east of Santa Cruz and north of Watsonville. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oregon

Research led by a University of Oregon doctoral student in California's Santa Cruz Mountains has uncovered geologic evidence that supports historical narratives for two earthquakes in the 68 years prior to San Francisco's devastating 1906 disaster.

The evidence places the two earthquakes, in 1838 and 1890, on the San Andreas Fault, as theorized by many researchers based on written accounts about damage to Spanish-built missions in the Monterey and San Francisco bay areas. These two quakes, as in 1906, were surface-rupturing events, the researchers concluded.

Continuing work, says San Francisco Bay-area native Ashley R. Streig, will dig deeper into the region's geological record -- layers of sediment along the fault -- to determine if the ensuing seismically quiet years make up a normal pattern -- or not -- of quake frequency along the fault.

Streig is lead author of the study, published in this month's issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. She collaborated on the project with her doctoral adviser Ray Weldon, professor of the UO's Department of Geological Sciences, and Timothy E. Dawson of the Menlo Park office of the California Geological Survey.

The study was the first to fully map the active fault trace in the Santa Cruz Mountains using a combination of on-the-ground observations and airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), a remote sensing technology. The Santa Cruz Mountains run for about 39 miles from south of San Francisco to near San Juan Batista. Hazel Dell is east of Santa Cruz and north of Watsonville.

"We found the first geologic evidence of surface rupture by what looks like the 1838 and 1890 earthquakes, as well as 1906," said Streig, whose introduction to major earthquakes came at age 11 during the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake on a deep sub-fault of the San Andreas Fault zone. That quake, which disrupted baseball's World Series, forced her family to camp outside their home.

Unlike the 1906 quake that ruptured 470 kilometers (296 miles) of the fault, the 1838 and 1890 quakes ruptured shorter portions of the fault, possibly limited to the Santa Cruz Mountains. "This is the first time we have had good, clear geologic evidence of these historic 19th century earthquakes," she said. "It's important because it tells us that we had three surface ruptures, really closely spaced in time that all had fairly large displacements of at least half a meter and probably larger."

The team identified ax-cut wood chips, tree stumps and charcoal fragments from early logging efforts in unexpectedly deep layers of sediment, 1.5 meters (five feet) below the ground, and document evidence of three earthquakes since logging occurred at the site. The logging story emerged from 16 trenches dug in 2008, 2010 and 2011 along the fault at the Hazel Dell site in the mountain range.

High-resolution radiocarbon dating of tree-rings from the wood chips and charcoal confirm these are post European deposits, and the geologic earthquake evidence coincides with written accounts describing local earthquake damage, including damage to Spanish missions in 1838, and in a USGS publication of earthquakes in 1890 catalogued by an astronomer from Lick Observatory.

Additionally, in 1906 individuals living near the Hazel Dell site reported to geologists that cracks from the 1906 earthquake had occurred just where they had 16 years earlier, in 1890, which, Streig and colleagues say, was probably centered in the Hazel Dell region. Another displacement of sediment at the Hazel Dell site matched the timeline of the 1906 quake.

The project also allowed the team to conclude that another historically reported quake, in 1865, was not surface rupturing, but it was probably deep and, like the 1989 event, occurred on a sub zone of the San Andreas Fault. Conventional thinking, Streig said, has suggested that the San Andreas Fault always ruptures in a long-reaching fashion similar to the 1906 earthquake. This study, however, points to more regionally confined ruptures as well.

"This all tells us that there are more frequent surface-rupturing earthquakes on this section of the fault than have been previously identified, certainly in the historic period," Streig said. "This becomes important to earthquake models because it is saying something about the connectivity of all these fault sections -- and how they might link up."

The frequency of the quakes in the Santa Cruz Mountains, she added, must have been a terrifying experience for settlers during the 68-year period.

"This study is the first to show three historic ruptures on the San Andreas Fault outside the special case of Parkfield," Weldon said, referring to a region in mountains to the south of the Santa Cruz range where six magnitude 6-plus earthquakes occurred between 1857 and 1966. "The earthquakes of 1838 and 1890 were known to be somewhere nearby from shaking, but now we know the San Andreas Fault ruptured three times on the same piece of the fault in less than 100 years."

More broadly, Weldon said, having multiple paleoseismic sites close together on a major fault, geologists now realize that interpretations gleaned from single-site evidence probably aren't reliable. "We need to spend more time reproducing or confirming results rather than rushing to the next fault if we are going to get it right," he said. "Ashley's combination of historical research, C-14 dating, tree rings, pollen and stratigraphic correlation between sites has allowed us to credibly argue for precision that allows identification of the 1838 and 1890 earthquakes."

"Researchers at the University of Oregon are using tools and technologies to further our understanding of the dynamic forces that continue to shape our planet and impact its people," said Kimberly Andrews Espy, vice president for research and innovation and dean of the UO Graduate School. "This research furthers our understanding of the connectivity of the various sections of California's San Andreas Fault and has the potential to save lives by leading to more accurate earthquake modeling."

The U.S. Geological Survey funded the research through grants 08-HQ-GR-0071, 08-HQ-GR-0072, G10AP00064, G10AP0065 and G11AP20123. A Geological Society of America Student Research Grant to Streig funded the age-dating of the team's evidence at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry.

Source: University of Oregon
Summary: Geologists have uncovered geologic evidence that supports historical narratives for two earthquakes in the 68 years prior to San Francisco's devastating 1906 disaster.

Read More

Los Angeles would experience stronger-than-expected ground motion in major earthquake, virtual earthquake generator shows

This screenshot from a supercomputer simulation shows the waveguide-to-basin effect in Southern California. First predicted in 2006, this effect has remained untested because a large earthquake has not occurred in the region in more than 150 years. Stanford scientists recently confirmed the effect using the virtual earthquake approach. Credit: Courtesy of Southern California Earthquake Center

Stanford scientists are using weak vibrations generated by Earth's oceans to produce "virtual earthquakes" that can be used to predict the ground movement and shaking hazard to buildings from real quakes.

The new technique, detailed in the Jan. 24 issue of the journal Science, was used to confirm a prediction that Los Angeles will experience stronger-than-expected ground movement if a major quake occurs south of the city.

"We used our virtual earthquake approach to reconstruct large earthquakes on the southern San Andreas Fault and studied the responses of the urban environment of Los Angeles to such earthquakes," said lead author Marine Denolle, who recently received her PhD in geophysics from Stanford and is now at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

The new technique capitalizes on the fact that earthquakes aren't the only sources of seismic waves. "If you put a seismometer in the ground and there's no earthquake, what do you record? It turns out that you record something," said study leader Greg Beroza, a geophysics professor at Stanford.

What the instruments will pick up is a weak, continuous signal known as the ambient seismic field. This omnipresent field is generated by ocean waves interacting with the solid Earth. When the waves collide with each other, they generate a pressure pulse that travels through the ocean to the sea floor and into Earth's crust. "These waves are billions of times weaker than the seismic waves generated by earthquakes," Beroza said.

Scientists have known about the ambient seismic field for about 100 years, but it was largely considered a nuisance because it interferes with their ability to study earthquakes. The tenuous seismic waves that make up this field propagate every which way through the crust. But in the past decade, seismologists developed signal-processing techniques that allow them to isolate certain waves; in particular, those traveling through one seismometer and then another one downstream.

Denolle built upon these techniques and devised a way to make these ambient seismic waves function as proxies for seismic waves generated by real earthquakes. By studying how the ambient waves moved underground, the researchers were able to predict the actions of much stronger waves from powerful earthquakes.

She began by installing several seismometers along the San Andreas Fault to specifically measure ambient seismic waves.

Employing data from the seismometers, the group then used mathematical techniques they developed to make the waves appear as if they originated deep within Earth. This was done to correct for the fact that the seismometers Denolle installed were located at Earth's surface, whereas real earthquakes occur at depth.

In the study, the team used their virtual earthquake approach to confirm the accuracy of a prediction, made in 2006 by supercomputer simulations, that if the southern San Andreas Fault section of California were to rupture and spawn an earthquake, some of the seismic waves traveling northward would be funneled toward Los Angeles along a 60-mile-long (100-kilometer-long) natural conduit that connects the city with the San Bernardino Valley. This passageway is composed mostly of sediments, and acts to amplify and direct waves toward the Los Angeles region.

Until now, there was no way to test whether this funneling action, known as the waveguide-to-basin effect, actually takes place because a major quake has not occurred along that particular section of the San Andreas Fault in more than 150 years.

The virtual earthquake approach also predicts that seismic waves will become further amplified when they reach Los Angeles because the city sits atop a large sedimentary basin. To understand why this occurs, study coauthor Eric Dunham, an assistant professor of geophysics at Stanford, said to imagine taking a block of plastic foam, cutting out a bowl-shaped hole in the middle, and filling the cavity with gelatin. In this analogy, the plastic foam is a stand-in for rocks, while the gelatin is like sediments, or dirt. "The gelatin is floppier and a lot more compliant. If you shake the whole thing, you're going to get some motion in the Styrofoam, but most of what you're going to see is the basin oscillating," Dunham said.

As a result, the scientists say, Los Angeles could be at risk for stronger, and more variable, ground motion if a large earthquake -- magnitude 7.0 or greater -- were to occur along the southern San Andreas Fault, near the Salton Sea.

"The seismic waves are essentially guided into the sedimentary basin that underlies Los Angeles," Beroza said. "Once there, the waves reverberate and are amplified, causing stronger shaking than would otherwise occur."

Beroza's group is planning to test the virtual earthquake approach in other cities around the world that are built atop sedimentary basins, such as Tokyo, Mexico City, Seattle and parts of the San Francisco Bay area. "All of these cities are earthquake threatened, and all of them have an extra threat because of the basin amplification effect," Beroza said.

Because the technique is relatively inexpensive, it could also be useful for forecasting ground motion in developing countries. "You don't need large supercomputers to run the simulations," Denolle said.
In addition to studying earthquakes that have yet to occur, the technique could also be used as a kind of "seismological time machine" to recreate the seismic signatures of temblors that shook Earth long ago, according to Beroza.

"For an earthquake that occurred 200 years ago, if you know where the fault was, you could deploy instruments, go through this procedure, and generate seismograms for earthquakes that occurred before seismographs were invented," he said.

German Prieto, an assistant professor of geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Stanford alumnus, also contributed to the research.

Source: Stanford University

Summary: Scientists have developed a new "virtual earthquake" technique and used it to confirm a prediction that Los Angeles would experience stronger-than-expected ground motion if a major quake occurred along the southern San Andreas Fault.

Read More