M7+ Virtual Earthquakes near Kanto Sedimentary Basin

Abstract:

The Tokyo Metropolitan area is subject to high earthquake activity due to its location near the complex junction of three plates. The seismic hazard Tokyo faces is amplified because it lies in the Kanto basin. The Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line (ISTL) is one of the crustal fault zones that comprise these plate boundaries. The ISTL accommodates plate motion between the North American Plate and the Eurasian Plate, hosts oblique-strike slip earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 7, and is only ~ 150-200km away from Tokyo. It is thought to be at a mature stage in its seismic cycle, and predicting strong ground motion from earthquakes on it is important for seismic hazard assessment. We take advantage of the dense seismic network MeSO-net (MEtropolitan Seismic Observation network) and of the locations of the Hi-net (High Sensitivity Seismograph network) stations near the ISTL fault to build virtual earthquakes from the ambient seismic field. First, we construct the Earth’s impulse responses from deconvolution of the ambient seismic field recorded between Hi-net stations (as sources) and MeSO-net stations (as receivers) with a method that preserves the relative amplitudes of the response. Fundamental and higher modes are often excited in sedimentary basins and we isolate them in the waveforms through phase velocity analysis in the frequency-wavenumber domain. The virtual earthquake approach turns each station-source near the fault into a double-couple point source by correcting the 9-component impulse response for source depth and mechanism. We use recordings of the M6.7 Northern Nagano earthquake that occurred on November 22, 2014 at the northern end of the fault segment to calibrate absolute amplitudes. We estimate the long period (1-10 seconds) ground motions for a suite of of M7+ scenario ruptures on the ISTL and explore the role of waveguides, basin resonance, and basin edges in strong ground motion.