Slip Updip of Tremor during the 2012 Cascadia ETS Event

Abstract:

The interplay between tremor and slow slip during ETS has implications for the slip budget of the Cascadia subduction zone. In particular, it can constrain the downdip edge of the locked zone, which informs the hazard assessments for major cities including Seattle, Tacoma, and Vancouver. As shown by Houston (AGU abstract, 2012), slip inferred from GPS extended updip of the seismically-detected tremor in the 2010 M6.8 ETS event. Following the methods used on the 2010 ETS event, we used the PANGA GPS to measure the displacement vectors for 71 stations to analyze a large ETS event in 2012 that extended from Vancouver Island to Southern Washington. We implemented Principal Component Analysis to automatically select the direction and magnitude of the maximum displacement vector. We then inverted these GPS displacements for slip, using the Okada formulation of buried rectangular faults in a halfspace with a grid of 8 by 8 km subfaults based on the McCrory slab model. We performed inversions with either 0th or 2nd order Tikhonov regularization and found that over the 6 weeks of propagation, the 2012 ETS event released moment corresponding to M6.7, in three high-slip regions. We compared two different inversions, one where slip was allowed on a broad regional grid and a tremor-restricted inversion (TRI) where slip was restricted to grid locations where tremor had been detected in the 2012 ETS. We found that the TRI forced the slip to the updip edge of the grid where it reached above 10 cm, which is physically implausible given that this exceeds the slip that can accumulate in an inter-ETS time period. Additionally, the regional grid inversion indicates that 1 to 2 cm of slip occurred 10’s of km updip of the western edge of tremor. This further supports the inference from the 2010 event that in northern Washington, the slow slip during an ETS event extends many kilometers updip of the western edge of tremor.