ALBERT

Description: An earthquake swarm of magnitudes up to M L  = 3.2 occurred in the region of West Bohemia/Vogtland (border area between Czech Republic and Germany) in autumn 2000. This swarm consisted of nine episodic phases and lasted 4 months. We retrieved source mechanisms of 102 earthquakes with magnitudes between M L  = 1.6 and 3.2 applying inversion of the peak amplitudes of direct P and SH waves, which were determined from ground motion seismograms. The investigated events cover the whole swarm activity in both time and space. We use data from permanent stations of seismic network WEBNET and from temporal stations, which were deployed in the epicentral area during the swarm; the number of stations varied from 7 to 18. The unconstrained moment tensor (MT) expression of the mechanism, which describes a general system of dipoles, that is both double-couple (DC) and non-DC sources, was applied. MTs of each earthquake were estimated by inversion of three different sets of data: P -wave amplitudes only, P - and SH -wave amplitudes and P -wave amplitudes along with the SH -wave amplitudes from a priori selected four ‘base’ WEBNET stations, the respective MT solutions are nearly identical for each event investigated. The resultant mechanisms of all events are dominantly DCs with only insignificant non-DC components mostly not exceeding 10 per cent. We checked reliability of the MTs in jackknife trials eliminating some data; we simulated the mislocation of hypocentre or contaminated the P - and SH -wave amplitudes by accidental errors. These tests proved stable and well constrained MT solutions. The massive dominance of the DC in all investigated events implies that the 2000 swarm consisted of a large number of pure shears along a fault plane. The focal mechanisms indicate both oblique-normal and oblique-thrust faulting, however, the oblique-normal faulting prevails. The predominant strikes and dips of the oblique-normal events fit well the geometry of the main fault plane Novy Kostel (NK) and also match the strike, dip and rake of the largest M L  = 4.6 earthquake of a strong swarm in 1985/86. On the contrary, the 2000 source mechanisms differ substantially from those of the 1997-swarm (which took place in two fault segments at the edge of the main NK fault plane) in both the faulting and the content of non-DC components. Further, we found that the scalar seismic moment M 0 is related to the local magnitude M L used by WEBNET as M 0 10 1.12M L , which differs from the scaling law using moment magnitude M w , that is M 0 10 1.5M w .