Tsunami waveform inversion for the 11 March, 2011, off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake (M 9.0) indicates that the source of the largest tsunami was located near the axis of the Japan trench. Ocean-bottom pressure, and GPS wave, gauges recorded two-step tsunami waveforms: a gradual increase of sea level (∼2 m) followed by an impulsive tsunami wave (3 to 5 m). The slip distribution estimated from 33 coastal tide gauges, offshore GPS wave gauges and bottom-pressure gauges show that the large slip, more than 40 m, was located along the trench axis. This offshore slip, similar but much larger than the 1896 Sanriku "tsunami earthquake," is responsible for the recorded large impulsive peak. Large slip on the plate interface at southern Sanriku-oki (∼30 m) and Miyagi-oki (∼17 m) around the epicenter, a similar location with larger slip than the previously proposed fault model of the 869 Jogan earthquake, is responsible for the initial water-level rise and, presumably, the large tsunami inundation in Sendai plain. The interplate slip is ∼10 m in Fukushima-oki, and less than 3 m in the Ibaraki-oki region. The total seismic moment is estimated as 3.8 × 10 22 N m (M w = 9.0).

No abstract

[1] We show fine-scale variations of seismic velocities and converted teleseismic waves that reveal the presence of zones of high-pressure fluids released by progressive metamorphic dehydration reactions in the subducting Philippine Sea plate in Tokai district, Japan. These zones have a strong correlation with the distribution of slow earthquakes, including long-term slow slip (LTSS) and low-frequency earthquakes (LFEs). Overpressured fluids in the LTSS region appear to be trapped within the oceanic crust by an impermeable cap rock in the fore-arc, and impede intraslab earthquakes therein. In contrast, fluid pressures are reduced in the LFE zone, which is deeper than the centroid of the LTSS, because there fluids are able to infiltrate into the narrow corner of the mantle wedge, leading to mantle serpentinization. The combination of fluids released from the subducting oceanic crust with heterogeneous fluid transport properties in the hanging wall generates variations of fluid pressures along the downgoing plate boundary, which in turn control the occurrence of slow earthquakes. Citation: Kato, A., et al. (2010), Variations of fluid pressure within the subducting oceanic crust and slow earthquakes, Geophys.

The 2011 Tohoku Earthquake caused a devastating tsunami along the shoreline from the Tohoku to Kanto districts. Although many of the tide gauge stations along the Tohoku coast were saturated or damaged due to the tsunami, two cabled ocean-bottom tsunami sensors installed off Kamaishi successfully recorded the tsunami waveform just above the source rupture area. The records indicated a characteristic two-stage tsunami development sequence: a smoothly increasing tsunami amplitude from 0 to 2 m during the first 800 s from the earthquake origin time, and a short-period impulsive tsunami with a peak of more than 5 m in the following 200 s. Such observations strongly suggest the lack of any sea floor upheaval at the stations during the earthquake, and the occurrence of an extremely large slip in the shallow portion of the subducting Pacific Plate near the trench axis. The source model derived from the offshore tsunami records indicates that a very large slip of 57 m occurred off Miyagi near the trench axis, south of the rupture area of the 1896 Meiji Sanriku tsunami earthquake, and was the major source of the highly destructive tsunami that subsequently developed.