Accurate Focal Depth Determination of Oceanic Earthquakes Using Water-column Reverberation and Some Implications for the Shrinking Plate Hypothesis

Abstract:

Investigation of oceanic earthquakes can play an important role in constraining the lateral and depth variations of the stress and strain-rate fields in oceanic lithosphere and of the thickness of the seismogenic layer as a function of lithosphere age, thereby providing us with critical insight into thermal and dynamic processes associated with the cooling and evolution of oceanic lithosphere. With the goal of estimating hypocentral depths more accurately, we observe clear water reverberations after the direct P wave on teleseismic records of oceanic earthquakes and develop a technique to estimate earthquake depths by using these reverberations. The Z-H grid search method allows the simultaneous determination of the sea floor depth (H) and earthquake depth (Z) with an uncertainty less than 1 km, which compares favorably with alternative approaches. We apply this method to two closely located earthquakes beneath the eastern Pacific. These earthquakes occur in ≈25 Ma-old lithosphere and were previously estimated to have very similar depths of ≈10–12 km. We find that the two events actually occurred at dissimilar depths of 2.5 km and 16.8 km beneath the seafloor, respectively within the oceanic crust and lithospheric mantle. The shallow and deep events are determined to be a thrust and normal earthquake, respectively, indicating that the stress field within the oceanic lithosphere changes from horizontal compression to horizontal extension as depth increases, which is consistent with the prediction of the lithospheric cooling model. Furthermore, we show that the P-axis of the newly investigated thrust-faulting earthquake is roughly perpendicular to that of the previously studied thrust event, consistent with the predictions of the shrinking-plate hypothesis.