HR: 0830h
AN: S41C-0107    [PDF]
TI: Major Existence of Very Low Frequency Earthquakes in Background Seismicity Along Subduction Zone of South-western Japan
AU: * Ishihara, Y
EM: ishihara@yokohama-cu.ac.jp
AF: Yokohama City University, Seto 22-2, Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama, 236-0027 Japan
AB: The condense, high quality and equalized broadband seismic network provided us to recognize the variety of seismic sources. The active volcanoes excite seismic waves with various frequency characteristics. Some cases show the long period seismic waves greater than 10 sec associates with volcanic activities. The tectonic seismic events originated at the close to trench zone are frequently lack of high frequency, greater than 1 Hz, seismic wave component. Meanwhile, the many low frequency earthquakes and tremors whose sources are not explicated are occurred in lower crust and subcrustal region. The subduction zone of Philippine Sea plate in south-western Japan is actively genetic area of low frequency earthquake group. The broadband seismic array of Japan region observed unknown long period ground motions. The seismograms are higher amplitude between 10 and 30 sec period than ground noise level. The earthquake JMA and USGS catalogues don_ft list about these long period seismograms. The arrival order of wave packet means that these events locate subduction zone around Japan. The hypocenters of unknown events are estimated by arrival times of vertical peak amplitude using the assumption that the ground motion dominates Rayleigh wave. The more detailed determination of major events is performed by combined technique for moment tensor inversion and grid search. The moment magnitude of uncatalogued event is greater than 3.5 because of the detection limitation. The largest event is distributed to about 4.5 Mw level and special event is greater than 5.0. The frequency characteristics show that source time is 7 to 20 sec by comparison with synthetic seismograms. We call these uncatalogued events _gvery low frequency earthquake_h. The hypocenters are located to two kinds of zones along the Philippine Sea subducting plate in south-western Japan. The one zone is very close to the trough. The seismicity listed by earthquake catalogues is low level in the zone and hypocenters are distributed in island arc side. The very low frequency earthquakes occur in outer area of seismic generation zone. The other zone is coincided with extended zone generating low frequency seismic events. Very low frequency earthquake occurs intermittently in limited area. Frequently, activity increases for some days and swarm type activity generates occasionally. To evaluate integrated seismicity for anomalous events, same class magnitude, greater than 3.0, events occurred in same and surrounding area are picked up from JMA earthquake catalogue. The analysis shows that seismicity of very low frequency earthquakes is comparative with one of normal earthquakes in background activity. We concluded that very low frequency earthquake is one of factors playing seismically important role.
DE: 7200 SEISMOLOGY
SC: Seismology [S]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting