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Evidence of Systematic Triggering at Teleseismic Distances Following Large Earthquakes

Earthquakes are part of a cycle of tectonic stress buildup and release. As fault zones near the end of this seismic cycle, tipping points may be reached whereby triggering occurs and small forces result in cascading failures. The extent of this effect on global seismicity is currently unknown. Here...

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Autores principales: O’Malley, Robert T., Mondal, Debashis, Goldfinger, Chris, Behrenfeld, Michael J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6072761/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30072731
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-30019-2
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author O’Malley, Robert T.
Mondal, Debashis
Goldfinger, Chris
Behrenfeld, Michael J.
author_facet O’Malley, Robert T.
Mondal, Debashis
Goldfinger, Chris
Behrenfeld, Michael J.
author_sort O’Malley, Robert T.
collection PubMed
description Earthquakes are part of a cycle of tectonic stress buildup and release. As fault zones near the end of this seismic cycle, tipping points may be reached whereby triggering occurs and small forces result in cascading failures. The extent of this effect on global seismicity is currently unknown. Here we present evidence of ongoing triggering of earthquakes at remote distances following large source events. The earthquakes used in this study had magnitudes ≥M5.0 and the time period analyzed following large events spans three days. Earthquake occurrences display increases over baseline rates as a function of arc distance away from the epicenters. The p-values deviate from a uniform distribution, with values for collective features commonly below 0.01. An average global forcing function of increased short term seismic risk is obtained along with an upper bound response. The highest magnitude source events trigger more events, and the average global response indicates initial increased earthquake counts followed by quiescence and recovery. Higher magnitude earthquakes also appear to be triggered more often than lower magnitude events. The region with the greatest chance of induced earthquakes following all source events is on the opposite side of the earth, within 30 degrees of the antipode.
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spelling pubmed-60727612018-08-07 Evidence of Systematic Triggering at Teleseismic Distances Following Large Earthquakes O’Malley, Robert T. Mondal, Debashis Goldfinger, Chris Behrenfeld, Michael J. Sci Rep Article Earthquakes are part of a cycle of tectonic stress buildup and release. As fault zones near the end of this seismic cycle, tipping points may be reached whereby triggering occurs and small forces result in cascading failures. The extent of this effect on global seismicity is currently unknown. Here we present evidence of ongoing triggering of earthquakes at remote distances following large source events. The earthquakes used in this study had magnitudes ≥M5.0 and the time period analyzed following large events spans three days. Earthquake occurrences display increases over baseline rates as a function of arc distance away from the epicenters. The p-values deviate from a uniform distribution, with values for collective features commonly below 0.01. An average global forcing function of increased short term seismic risk is obtained along with an upper bound response. The highest magnitude source events trigger more events, and the average global response indicates initial increased earthquake counts followed by quiescence and recovery. Higher magnitude earthquakes also appear to be triggered more often than lower magnitude events. The region with the greatest chance of induced earthquakes following all source events is on the opposite side of the earth, within 30 degrees of the antipode. Nature Publishing Group UK 2018-08-02 /pmc/articles/PMC6072761/ /pubmed/30072731 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-30019-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2018 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
O’Malley, Robert T.
Mondal, Debashis
Goldfinger, Chris
Behrenfeld, Michael J.
Evidence of Systematic Triggering at Teleseismic Distances Following Large Earthquakes
title Evidence of Systematic Triggering at Teleseismic Distances Following Large Earthquakes
title_full Evidence of Systematic Triggering at Teleseismic Distances Following Large Earthquakes
title_fullStr Evidence of Systematic Triggering at Teleseismic Distances Following Large Earthquakes
title_full_unstemmed Evidence of Systematic Triggering at Teleseismic Distances Following Large Earthquakes
title_short Evidence of Systematic Triggering at Teleseismic Distances Following Large Earthquakes
title_sort evidence of systematic triggering at teleseismic distances following large earthquakes
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6072761/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30072731
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-30019-2
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