Analysis of recent glacial earthquakes in Greenland

Abstract:

Large calving events at Greenland’s outlet glaciers produce teleseismically detectable glacial earthquakes. These events are observed in the seismic record for the past 22 years, but the complete catalog of glacial earthquakes still numbers only ~300. The annual occurrence of these long-period events has increased over time, which makes recent years especially valuable in expanding the global dataset. Glacial earthquakes from 1993- 2010 have been analyzed systematically (Tsai and Ekström, 2007; Veitch and Nettles, 2012). Here, we analyze more recent events using the same centroid—single-force (CSF) approach as previous authors, focusing initially on data from 2013. In addition, we perform a focused study of selected events from 2009-2010 to assess the reliability of the force azimuths obtained from such inversions.

Recent spatial and temporal patterns of glacial earthquakes in Greenland differ from those in previous years. In 2013, three times as many events occurred on the west coast as on the east, and these events originated predominantly from two glaciers: Jakobshavn Glacier on the west coast and Helheim Glacier on the east. Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier, on the east coast, produced no glacial earthquakes in 2013, though it produced many events in earlier years.

Previous CSF results for glacial earthquakes show force azimuths perpendicular to the glacier front during a calving event, with force plunges near horizontal. However, some azimuths indicate forces initially oriented upglacier, while others are oriented downglacier (seaward). We perform a set of experiments on events from 2009 and 2010 and find two acceptable solutions for each glacial earthquake, oriented 180° apart with plunges of opposite sign and centroid times differing by approximately one half of the assumed duration of the earthquake time function. These results suggest the need for a more complex time function to model glacial earthquakes more accurately.