Active tectonics in the Gulf of California and seismicity (M > 3.0) for the period 2002–2014

Abstract

We present a catalog of accurate epicenter coordinates of earthquakes located in the Gulf of California (GoC) in the period 2002–2014 that permits us to analyze the seismotectonics and to estimate the depth of the seismogenic zone of this region. For the period April 2002 to December 2014 we use body-wave arrival times from regional stations of the Broadband Seismological Network of the GoC (RESBAN) operated by CICESE to improve hypocenter locations reported by global catalogs. For the northern region of the GoC (30°N–32°N) we added relocated events from the 2011-Hauksson-Yang-Shearer, Waveform Relocated Earthquake Catalog for Southern California (Hauksson et al., 2012; Lin et al., 2007). From October 2005 to October 2006 we incorporated hypcenters located by Sumy et al. (2013) in the southern GoC combining an array of ocean-bottom seismographs, of the SCOOBA experiment, with onshore stations of the NARS-Baja array. This well constrained catalog of seismicity highlights zones of active tectonics and seismic deformation within the North America-Pacific plate boundary. We estimate that the minimum magnitude of completeness of this catalog is Mc = 3.3 ± 0.1 and the b = 0.92 ± 0.04 value of the Gutenberg-Richter relation. We find that most earthquakes in the southern GoC are generated by transform faults and this region is more active than the central GoC region. However, the northern region, where most deformation is generated by oblique faults is as active as the southern region. We used the ISC catalog to evaluate the size distribution of seismicity of these regions, and the b value of the Gutenberg-Richter relation and found that b is slightly lower in the central GoC (b = 0.86 ± 0.02) compared to the northern (b = 1.14 ± 0.04) and the southern (b = 1.11 ± 0.04) regions. We observed seismicity that occurs in the Stable Central Peninsular Province, despite the fact that significant active deformation has not been identified in this region.

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