The Viscoelastic Effect of Triggered Earthquakes in Various Tectonic Regions On a Global Scale

Abstract:

The relation between static stress changes and earthquake triggering has important implications for seismic hazard analysis. Considering long time difference between triggered events, viscoelastic stress transfer plays an important role in stress accumulation along the faults. Developing a better understanding of triggering effects may contribute to improvement of quantification of seismic hazard in tectonically active regions. Parsons (2002) computed the difference between the rate of earthquakes occurring in regions where shear stress increased and those regions where the shear stress decreased on a global scale. He found that 61% of the earthquakes occurred in regions with a shear stress increase, while 39% of events occurred in areas of shear stress decrease. Here, we test whether the inclusion of viscoelastic stress transfer affects the results obtained by Parsons (2002) for static stress transfer. Doing such a systematic analysis, we use Global Centroid Moment Tensor (CMT) catalog selecting 289 Ms>7 main shocks with their ~40.500 aftershocks located in ±2° circles for 5 years periods. For the viscoelastic post seismic calculations, we adapt 12 different published rheological models for 5 different tectonic regions. In order to minimise the uncertainties in this CMT catalog, we use the Frohlich and Davis (1999) statistical approach simultaneously. Our results shows that the 5590 aftershocks are triggered by the 289 Ms>7 earthquakes. 3419 of them are associated with calculated shear stress increase, while 2171 are associated with shear stress decrease. The summation of viscoelastic stress shows that, of the 5840 events, 3530 are associated with shear stress increases, and 2312 with shear stress decrease. This result shows an average 4.5% increase in total, the rate of increase in positive and negative areas are 3.2% and 6.5%, respectively. Therefore, over long time periods viscoelastic relaxation represents a considerable contribution to the total stress on neighbouring faults.