The shallower portions of subduction zone megathrust faults host Earth’s most hazardous tsunamigenic earthquakes, yet understanding how and when they slip remains elusive because of challenges making seafloor observations. We performed Global Navigation Satellite System Acoustic seafloor geodetic surveys before and ~2.5 months after the 29 July 2021 M w (moment magnitude) 8.2 Chignik, Alaska, earthquake and determine ~1.4 meters cumulative co- and post-seismic horizontal displacement ~60 kilometers from the megathrust front. Only for the 2011 M w 9 Tohoku event have closer subduction zone earthquake displacements been observed. We estimate ~2 to 3 meters of megathrust afterslip shallower than 20 kilometers, a portion of the megathrust on which both inter- and co-seismic slip likely had occurred previously. Our analysis demonstrates that by 2.5 months, shallower and deeper moment had effectively equilibrated on the megathrust, suggesting that its tsunamigenic potential remains no more elevated than before the earthquake.
Accurate seafloor geodetic methods are critical to the study of marine natural hazards such as megathrust earthquakes, landslides, and volcanoes. We propose digital image correlation of repeated shipboard sidescan sonar surveys as a measurement of seafloor deformation. We test this method using multibeam surveys collected in two locales: 2500 m deep lightly sedimented seafloor on the flank of a spreading ridge and 4300 m deep heavily sedimented seafloor far from any plate boundary. Correlation of these surveys are able to recover synthetic displacements in the across‐track (range) direction accurate to within 1 m and in the along‐track (azimuth) direction accurate to within 1–10 m. We attribute these accuracies to the inherent resolution of sidescan data being better in the range dimension than the azimuth dimension. These measurements are primarily limited by the accuracy of the ship navigation. Dual‐frequency GPS units are accurate to ∼10 cm, but single‐frequency GPS units drift on the order of 1 m/h and are insufficient for geodetic application.
Seafloor geodetic studies such as Global Positioning System (GPS)-Acoustic experiments often require the measurement platform on the sea surface to be positioned accurately to within a few centimetres. In this paper, we test the utility of Precise Point Positioning (PPP) for this application with two experiments. The first fixed platform experiment is a comparison between three independent processing software packages: Positioning and Navigation Data Analyst (PANDA), Global Navigation Satellite System-Inferred Positioning System and Orbit Analysis Simulation Software (GIPSY-OASIS), and the Canadian Spatial Reference System (CSRS)) and a more accurate solution based on conventional differential processing of a remote GPS station in the Aleutian Islands. The second moving platform experiment is a comparison among the three PPP software packages using 40 hours of ship navigation data collected during the Roger Revelle RR1605 cruise 170 nautical miles southwest of Palau in May 2016. We found the PPP solutions were repeatable to 5·49 cm in the horizontal components and 12·4 cm in the vertical component. This demonstrates not only that PPP is a useful tool for positioning marine platforms in remote locations, but also that modern ship navigation instruments such as the Kongsberg Seapath 330 + are suitable for seafloor geodetic application.
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