The continuously growing amount of seismic data collected worldwide is outpacing our abilities for analysis, since to date, such datasets have been analyzed in a human-expertintensive, supervised fashion. Moreover, analyses that are conducted can be strongly biased by the standard models employed by seismologists. In response to both of these challenges, we develop a new unsupervised machine learning framework for detecting and clustering seismic signals in continuous seismic records. Our approach combines a deep scattering network and a Gaussian mixture model to cluster seismic signal segments and detect novel structures. To illustrate the power of the framework, we analyze seismic data acquired during the June 2017 Nuugaatsiaq, Greenland landslide. We demonstrate the blind detection and recovery of the repeating precursory seismicity that was recorded before the main landslide rupture, which suggests that our approach could lead to more informative forecasting of the seismic activity in seismogenic areas.
Ambient seismic noise correlations are widely used for high-resolution surface-wave imaging of Earth's lithosphere. Similar observations of the seismic body waves that propagate through the interior of Earth would provide a window into the deep Earth. We report the observation of the mantle transition zone through noise correlations of P waves as they are reflected by the discontinuities associated with the top [410 kliometers (km)] and the bottom (660 km) of this zone. Our data demonstrate that high-resolution mapping of the mantle transition zone is possible without using earthquake sources.
The Valparaiso 2017 sequence occurred in the Central Chile megathrust, an active zone where the last mega‐earthquake occurred in 1730. Intense seismicity started 2 days before the Mw 6.9 mainshock, a slow trenchward movement was observed in the coastal GPS antennas and was accompanied by foreshocks and repeater‐type seismicity. To characterize the rupture process of the mainshock, we perform a dynamic inversion using the strong‐motion records and an elliptical patch approach. We suggest that a slow slip event preceded and triggered the Mw 6.9 earthquake, which ruptured an elliptical asperity (semiaxis of 10 km and 5 km, with a subshear rupture, stress drop of 11.71 MPa, yield stress of 17.21 MPa, slip weakening of 0.65 m, and kappa value of 1.98). This earthquake could be the beginning of a long‐term nucleation phase to a major rupture, within the highly coupled Central Chile zone where a megathrust earthquake like 1730 is expected.
We present here a global analysis showing that wave paths probing the deepest part of the Earth can be obtained from ambient noise records. Correlations of seismic noise recorded at sensors located various distances apart provide new virtual seismograms for paths that are not present in earthquake data. The main arrivals already known for earthquake data are also present in teleseismic correlations sections, including waves that have propagated through the Earth's core. We present examples of applications of such teleseismic correlations to lithospheric imaging, study of the core mantle boundary or of the anisotropy of the inner core.
On 16 September 2015, the M w 8.3 Illapel, Chile, earthquake broke a large area of the Coquimbo region of north-central Chile. This area was well surveyed by more than 15 high-rate Global Positioning System (GPS) instruments, installed starting in 2004, and by the new national seismological network deployed in Chile. Previous studies had shown that the Coquimbo region near Illapel was coupled to about 60%. After the M w 8.8 Maule megathrust earthquake of 27 February 2010, we observed a large-scale postseismic deformation, which resulted in a strain rate increase of about 15% in the region of Illapel. This observation agrees with our modeling of viscous relaxation after the Maule earthquake. The area where upper-plate GPS velocity increased coincides very well with the slip distribution of the Illapel earthquake inverted from GPS measurements of coseismic displacement. The mainshock started with a small-amplitude nucleation phase that lasted 20 s. Backprojection of seismograms recorded in North America confirms the extent of the rupture, determined from local observations, and indicates a strong directivity from deeper to shallower rupture areas. The coseismic displacement shows an elliptical slip distribution of about 200 km × 100 km with a localized zone where the rupture is deeper near 31.3°S. This distribution is consistent with the uplift observed in some GPS sites and inferred from field observations of bleached coralline algae in the Illapel coastal area. Most of aftershocks relocated in this study were interplate events, although some of the events deeper than 50 km occurred inside the Nazca plate and had tension (slab-pull) mechanisms. The majority of the aftershocks were located outside the 5 m contour line of the inferred slip distribution of the mainshock.
S U M M A R YAmbient noise correlation is now widely used in seismology to obtain the surface waves part of Green's function. More difficult is the extraction of body waves from noise correlations. Using 42 temporary broad-band three components stations located on the northern part of the fennoscandian region, we identify high-frequency (0.5-2 Hz) body waves emerging from noise correlations for inter-station distances up to 550 km. The comparison of the noise correlations with earthquake data confirms that the observed waves can be interpreted as P and S waves reflected from the Moho. Because the crustal model of the area is well known, we also compared the noise correlations with synthetic seismograms, and found an excellent agreement between the travel times of all the observed phases. Polarization analysis provides a further argument to confirm the observation of body waves.
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