Reviving mB

Creators: Kanamori, Hiroo; Ross, Zachary E.

Abstract

We determine m_B, the original body wave magnitude developed by Gutenberg and Richter over the period 1942–1956, for about 3300 M_w ≥ 6 earthquakes for the period 1988–present using modern broad-band seismograms. The main objective is to extend the database of energy-related parameters by combining m_B databases for recent and old events. The radiated energy ER_B (in erg) computed from m_B using the Gutenberg & Richter relation loge_(R_B) = 2.4m_B + 5.8 agrees very well with E_R estimated with modern techniques, especially for large deep earthquakes. Thus, E_(R_B) is useful as a proxy for E_R to investigate the global diversity of earthquake characteristics and physics over an extended period of time.

Additional Information

© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model). Received: 13 June 2018; Revision Received: 08 November 2018; Accepted: 28 November 2018; Published: 30 November 2018. We thank James Dewey for providing us with helpful information on the practice for magnitude determination at the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) of the U.S. Geological Survey. Numerous discussions with him helped us to maintain the consistency of our results with the traditional m_b and m_B. We benefitted from discussion with Luis Rivera on spectral scaling relations. Comments from Lingling Ye and Thorne Lay resulted in clarification of the main points of this work. We thank Larry Ruff for a helpful review. We thank an anonymous reviewer for a very careful review of the manuscript and stimulating comments. We extensively used the continuous broad-band seismograms orderly archived at the Data Management Center of the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS). We acknowledge the contributions of many global seismic networks that provided their data to the IRIS database. We used General Mapping Tools developed and maintained by Paul Wessel and Walter Smith. Z.E.R was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

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