Shallow repeating slow-slip-events along the convergent block boundary in northern Hokkaido, Japan

Abstract:

The Japanese Islands are divided into several crustal blocks [e.g. Loveless and Meade, 2010 JGR]. In the Northern Hokkaido, the boundary between the Amurian and the North American Plates run north-south between 44.0N and 45.4N. The east-west block convergence is considered to be as fast as ~1 cm/year there, but few large earthquakes are known to have occurred along this boundary. Recently, a slow slip event (SSE) is reported to have occurred in a segment at ~45.0N over a 4 months period from 2012 summer to the early 2013 [Ohzono et al., 2014 GJI]. The maximum surface movements was about 15 mm, and the moment magnitude of the SSE would not exceed 6.0 (fault slip is estimated as 10 cm). This suggests that plate convergence takes place as episodic SSEs in this block boundary. In this research, we looked for signatures of repeating SSEs along this block boundary using continuous GNSS data of the dense array GEONET in Japan. In order to detect faint signatures of SSEs in the coordinate time series, we adopted the method using AIC (Akaike's Information Criterion) similar to Nishimura et al. [2013 JGR] and Nishimura [2014 PEPS]. As a result, we were able to find numbers of SSE signals in various segments along the boundary. The detected SSEs are all fairly small, and surface movements did not exceed a few millimeters (except the 2012-2013 SSE reported in Ohzono et al. [2014]). We also searched earthquakes that may have triggered these SSEs. Although the 2012 SSE seems to have been triggered by a deep earthquake beneath Sakhalin on Aug. 14, 2012, no clear triggering earthquakes were identified for other SSEs. SSEs in subduction zones are known to recur fairly regularly, e.g. biannually repeating SSE in the SW part of the Ryukyu Arc [Heki and Kataoka, 2008 JGR]. However, shallow SSEs along the block boundary in the northern Hokkaido did not show such regular occurrences. We plan to confirm these SSE occurrences by comparing GNSS data with the Hi-Net tiltmeter records.