Publication Date:
2013-09-21
Description:
Earth's deepest earthquakes occur in subducting oceanic lithosphere, where temperatures are lower than in ambient mantle. On 24 May 2013, a magnitude 8.3 earthquake ruptured a 180-kilometer-long fault within the subducting Pacific plate about 609 kilometers below the Sea of Okhotsk. Global seismic P wave recordings indicate a radiated seismic energy of ~1.5 x 10(17) joules. A rupture velocity of ~4.0 to 4.5 kilometers/second is determined by back-projection of short-period P waves, and the fault width is constrained to give static stress drop estimates (~12 to 15 megapascals) compatible with theoretical radiation efficiency for crack models. A nearby aftershock had a stress drop one to two orders of magnitude higher, indicating large stress heterogeneity in the deep slab, and plausibly within the rupture process of the great event.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Ye, Lingling -- Lay, Thorne -- Kanamori, Hiroo -- Koper, Keith D -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2013 Sep 20;341(6152):1380-4. doi: 10.1126/science.1242032.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24052306" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
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Chemistry and Pharmacology
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Computer Science
,
Medicine
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Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
