Collaborative Research: Earthquake swarms and aseismic slip in the Salton Trough: High-resolution imaging of the upper frictional stability transition.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole MA

Investigators

Abstract

Efforts to understand the build-up and release of stress along active fault zones require detailed studies of individual faults and placement of those results in a physical framework consistent with our knowledge about rock mechanics. One particularly intriguing fault zone behavior that has been observed with increasing frequency in recent years involves the interplay between aseismic slip and seismic swarm activity. Slow fault slip has been observed to trigger earthquake swarms in a variety of tectonic environments including subduction zones, volcanic systems, and continental strike-slip faults such as those in close proximity to population centers in Southern California. One region that provides a prime environment to study seismic swarms and aseismic creep is the Imperial Valley/Salton Trough in Southern California. Seismic swarms, large (Mw>7) earthquakes, and transient episodes of fault creep are all frequent occurrences along the plate boundary faults within the Salton Trough. The Salton Trough offers a prime opportunity to examine the interplay between these varied types of fault activity, since so many of them are observed within a relatively small geographic area, which also has had very detailed geologic studies and contains one of the world?s densest seismic and geodetic station networks. Detailed studies of aseismic and seismic events offer an opportunity to connect physical properties of the fault-zone such as rock type, depth, and temperature with rock-mechanical properties such as frictional stability, and will allow us to better understand the temporal evolution of seismic hazard associated with individual fault zones. We propose a combination of an active source seismic study of the 2005 swarm's primary fault zone, and a more detailed analysis of the existing seismic and geodetic data. The core of our effort is a one-week seismic survey using the high-res profiling techniques developed by the USGS-Menlo Park group that will provide constraints on the details of fault-zone geometry and rigidity structure. These results will be used to improve our studies of the 2005 swarm. The combination of these studies will allow us to study the relations between rock-type, rigidity, thermal structure and frictional stability. Because shallow creep and earthquake swarms are general properties of major faults in the Salton Trough, our results will provide inputs to physics based earthquake hazard models in the region.