Source of the 6 February 2013 Mw 8.0 Santa Cruz Islands Tsunami.

Abstract:

On February 6, 2013 a M_w8.0 interplate earthquake occurred in the Santa Cruz Islands region. The epicenter is located near a complex section of the Australia-Pacific plate boundary, where a short segment of dominantly strike-slip plate motion links the Solomon Trench to the New Hebrides Trench. In this region, the Australia plate subducts beneath the Pacific plate with a convergence rate of ~9cm/yr.

This earthquake generated a tsunami that struck the city of Lata and several villages located on the Nendo island with tsunami height exceeding 11m (Fritz et al.,2014). The tsunami has been distinctly recorded by 5 DART buoys in the Pacific Ocean and by some tide-gauges at Solomon Islands, Fiji Islands, and New Caledonia.

In this work we retrieve the source of the tsunami by inverting the signals recorded by both DART buoys and tide-gauges, and using an earthquake fault model that accounts for the variability of the subduction plate geometry. We compare and discuss our tsunamigenic slip model with previous coseismic slip models obtained by teleseismic data (Hayes et al.,2013) and telesismic data constrained by tsunami records (Lay et al.,2013). Our preferred tsunami source (maximum slip value of ~10m) is located southeast from the hypocenter and the slip direction is in agreement with the convergence direction that becomes progressively more oblique in the NW segment. We find a tsunami source roughly consistent to a possible source of low frequency radiation (http://www.iris.edu/spud/backprojection) and/or to the region of aseismic slip argued by Hayes et al. (2013). However, we do not find significantly tsunamigenic slip in the region of seismic high frequency radiation around the hypocenter.