Sources of shaking and flooding during the Tohoku-Oki earthquake: A mixture of rupture styles
Abstract
Modeling strong ground motions from great subduction zone earthquakes is one of the great challenges of computational seismology. To separate the rupture characteristics from complexities caused by 3D sub-surface geology requires an extraordinary data set such as provided by the recent Mw9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake. Here we combine deterministic inversion and dynamically guided forward simulation methods to model over one thousand high-rate GPS and strong motion observations from 0 to 0.25 Hz across the entire Honshu Island. Our results display distinct styles of rupture with a deeper generic interplate event (∼Mw8.5) transitioning to a shallow tsunamigenic earthquake (∼Mw9.0) at about 25 km depth in a process driven by a strong dynamic weakening mechanism, possibly thermal pressurization. This source model predicts many important features of the broad set of seismic, geodetic and seafloor observations providing a major advance in our understanding of such great natural hazards.
Additional Information
© 2012 Elsevier B.V. Accepted 6 April 2012. Editor: P. Shearer. This research was supported by NSF Grant EAR-1142020 and USGS Award G10AP00048. Shengji Wei is supported in part under USGS Cooperative Agreement G09AC00150. Some of the large-scale 3D finite difference simulations were run at the University of Southern California's Center for High Performance Computing and Communications(http://www.usc.edu/hpcc) under an agreement with the SCEC Community Modeling Environment project. The high-rate GPS data, generously made available by C Rocken of GPS Solutions, Inc. originated with efforts by GSI, NGDS, Hitz, GPSS and VERIPOS. Processed GPS time series are provided through the Caltech ARIA project. Strong motion waveforms were obtained from K-Net and KiK-Net of NIED. The Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) were used for creating the figures. We thank Morgan Page and Kenneth Hudnut for their comments.Attached Files
Supplemental Material - mmc1.doc
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 33564
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.epsl.2012.04.006
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20120827-114719257
- EAR-1142020
- NSF
- G10AP00048
- USGS
- G09AC00150
- USGS
- Created
-
2012-08-27Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Seismological Laboratory, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences