Event Detection and Location of Earthquakes Using the Cascadia Initiative Dataset

Abstract:

The Cascadia subduction zone (CSZ) produces a range of slip behavior along the plate boundary megathrust, from great earthquakes to episodic slow slip and tremor (ETS). Unlike other subduction zones that produce great earthquakes and ETS, the CSZ is notable for the lack of small and moderate magnitude earthquakes recorded.

The seismogenic zone extent is currently estimated to be primarily offshore, thus the lack of observed small, interplate earthquakes may be partially due to the use of only land seismometers. The Cascadia Initiative (CI) community seismic experiment seeks to address this issue by including ocean bottom seismometers (OBS) deployed directly over the locked seismogenic zone, in addition to land seismometers. We use these seismic data to explore whether small magnitude earthquakes are occurring on the plate interface, but have gone undetected by the land-based seismic networks. We select a subset of small magnitude (M0.1-3.7) earthquakes from existing earthquake catalogs, based on land seismic data, whose preliminary hypocentral locations suggest they may have occurred on the plate interface. We window the waveforms on CI OBS and land seismometers around the phase arrival times for these earthquakes to generate templates for subspace detection, which allows for additional flexibility over traditional matched filter detection methods. Here we present event detections from the first year of CI deployment and preliminary locations for the detected events. Initial results of scanning the first year of the CI deployment using one cluster of template events, located near a previously identified subducted seamount, include 473 detections on OBS station M08A (~61.6 km offshore) and 710 detections on OBS station J25A (~44.8 km northeast of M08A). Ongoing efforts include detection using additional OBS stations along the margin, as well as determining locations of clusters detected in the first year of deployment.