Ambiguity of the Moment Tensor

An earthquake on a fault separating two dissimilar materials does not have a well-defined moment density tensor. We present a complete characterization of this bimaterial ambiguity in the general case of slip on a fault in an anisotropic medium. The ambiguity can be eliminated by utilizing a potency density rather than a moment density representation of a bimaterial source

The Bolivian beef cattle industry: effects of transportation projects upon plant location and product flows in Beni

Bolivia has the potential to become an important beef exporting country in South America. However, to penetrate foreign markets (in Chile, Peru, and Brazil) she must upgrade her processing facilities. This calls for the construction of new slaughterhouses.;In the course of the 1980s, several new transport linkages (involving roads, railways, and waterways) are to be completed as Bolivians seek to integrate their territory. Most of these new linkages will connect the department of Beni, in the tropical lowland, with the rest of the country. It is in Beni where the greatest potential for cattle-beef production exists.;This study seeks to examine what will happen with the optimal location patterns of new slaughterhouses in Beni and factor-product flows as the new transportation connections are completed. The criterion of optimality selected in the analysis is the minimum combined costs of assembling and slaughtering cattle and distributing beef. Two beef qualities, four plant sizes, four levels of operation, and four export scenarios are considered. The analysis employs an iterative linear programming procedure.;It is found that the new transport projects have a negligible impact upon optimal patterns of plant locations, sizes and levels of operation and factor-product flows. This is so because: (a) For most routes, the new road and rail connections do not reduce transport costs of beef. As a consequence, air transportation continues to be the dominant mode for beef shipments; (b) there exist various institutional constraints, not considered in the mathematical model, which increase beef transport costs in relation to those of live cattle; and (c) given a slaughterhouse size and level of operation, all plant sites have identical processing costs.;The analysis indicates that alternative export scenarios have significant effects upon optimal locations, numbers, and sizes of slaughterhouses. This implies that plant location patterns should be formulated after foreign market opportunities have been carefully assessed.;Various factors were not considered in the analysis, such as other livestock types, taxes and levies, cattle by-products, and seasonal variations in the transportation infrastructure. The study permits one to focus on various areas in which existing information is weak. Several possible extensions of the analysis are suggested

Earthquake nucleation on (aging) rate and state faults

We obtain quasi-static, two-dimensional solutions for earthquake nucleation on faults obeying Dieterich's “aging” version of the rate and state friction equations. Two distinct nucleation regimes are found, separated by roughly a/b ∼ 0.5, where a and b are the constitutive parameters relating changes in slip rate V and state θ to frictional strength. When fault healing is unimportant (Vθ/D_c ≫ 1, where D_c is the characteristic slip distance for the evolution of θ), the nucleation zone spontaneously evolves toward a state of accelerating slip on a patch of fixed half length L_ν ≈ 1.3774(μ′D_c /bσ), where μ′ is the intrinsic stiffness of the medium and σ is the normal stress. This is the fixed length solution for which the stress intensity factor K = 0. Although this solution does not depend upon a/b explicitly, only for a/b < 0.3781 does healing remain unimportant as instability is approached. For a/b ≳ 0.5 and a wide range of slow loading conditions, Vθ/D_c ultimately approaches a quasi-constant value near 1, and the nucleation zone takes on the appearance of an expanding slip-weakening crack. A fracture energy balance indicates that in this regime the nucleation length asymptotically approaches π−1[b/(b − a)]2(μ′D_c /bσ), a result that is consistent with the numerical simulations despite considerable complexity asa approaches b. This suggests that nucleation lengths can sometimes be much larger than those found by Dieterich (e.g., by a factor of 100 for a/b = 0.95). For surfaces this close to velocity neutral, nucleation might produce signals detectable by surface seismometers for values of D_c at the upper end of the lab range (100 μm). However, the attributes of the aging law that give rise to such large nucleation lengths may be nonphysical; additional laboratory experiments are needed to address this issue

Verification of an ADER-DG method for complex dynamic rupture problems

We present results of thorough benchmarking of an arbitrary high-order derivative discontinuous Galerkin (ADER-DG) method on unstructured meshes for advanced earthquake dynamic rupture problems. We verify the method by comparison to well-established numerical methods in a series of verification exercises, including dipping and branching fault geometries, heterogeneous initial conditions, bimaterial interfaces and several rate-and-state friction laws. We show that the combination of meshing flexibility and high-order accuracy of the ADER-DG method makes it a competitive tool to study earthquake dynamics in geometrically complicated setups

Localized seismic deformation in the upper mantle revealed by dense seismic arrays

Seismicity along continental transform faults is usually confined to the upper half of the crust, but the Newport-Inglewood fault (NIF), a major fault traversing the Los Angeles basin, is seismically active down to the upper mantle. We use seismic array analysis to illuminate the seismogenic root of the NIF beneath Long Beach, California, and identify seismicity in an actively deforming localized zone penetrating the lithospheric mantle. Deep earthquakes, which are spatially correlated with geochemical evidence of a fluid pathway from the mantle, as well as with a sharp vertical offset in the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary, exhibit narrow size distribution and weak temporal clustering. We attribute these characteristics to a transition from strong to weak interaction regimes in a system of seismic asperities embedded in a ductile fault zone matrix

Are Rapid Population Estimates Accurate? A Field Trial of Two Different Assessment Methods.

Emergencies resulting in large-scale displacement often lead to populations resettling in areas where basic health services and sanitation are unavailable. To plan relief-related activities quickly, rapid population size estimates are needed. The currently recommended Quadrat method estimates total population by extrapolating the average population size living in square blocks of known area to the total site surface. An alternative approach, the T-Square, provides a population estimate based on analysis of the spatial distribution of housing units taken throughout a site. We field tested both methods and validated the results against a census in Esturro Bairro, Beira, Mozambique. Compared to the census (population: 9,479), the T-Square yielded a better population estimate (9,523) than the Quadrat method (7,681; 95% confidence interval: 6,160-9,201), but was more difficult for field survey teams to implement. Although applicable only to similar sites, several general conclusions can be drawn for emergency planning

The transition of dynamic rupture styles in elastic media under velocity-weakening friction

Although kinematic earthquake source inversions show dominantly pulse-like subshear rupture behavior, seismological observations, laboratory experiments and theoretical models indicate that earthquakes can operate with different rupture styles: either as pulses or cracks, that propagate at subshear or supershear speeds. The determination of rupture style and speed has important implications for ground motions and may inform about the state of stress and strength of active fault zones. We conduct 2D in-plane dynamic rupture simulations with a spectral element method to investigate the diversity of rupture styles on faults governed by velocity-and-state-dependent friction with dramatic velocity-weakening at high slip rate. Our rupture models are governed by uniform initial stresses, and are artificially initiated. We identify the conditions that lead to different rupture styles by investigating the transitions between decaying, steady state and growing pulses, cracks, sub-shear and super-shear ruptures as a function of background stress, nucleation size and characteristic velocity at the onset of severe weakening. Our models show that small changes of background stress or nucleation size may lead to dramatic changes of rupture style. We characterize the asymptotic properties of steady state and self-similar pulses as a function of background stress. We show that an earthquake may not be restricted to a single rupture style, but that complex rupture patterns may emerge that consist of multiple rupture fronts, possibly involving different styles and back-propagating fronts. We also demonstrate the possibility of a super-shear transition for pulse-like ruptures. Finally, we draw connections between our findings and recent seismological observations

Automated Seismic Source Characterisation Using Deep Graph Neural Networks

Most seismological analysis methods require knowledge of the geographic location of the stations comprising a seismic network. However, common machine learning tools used in seismology do not account for this spatial information, and so there is an underutilised potential for improving the performance of machine learning models. In this work, we propose a Graph Neural Network (GNN) approach that explicitly incorporates and leverages spatial information for the task of seismic source characterisation (specifically, location and magnitude estimation), based on multi-station waveform recordings. Even using a modestly-sized GNN, we achieve model prediction accuracy that outperforms methods that are agnostic to station locations. Moreover, the proposed method is flexible to the number of seismic stations included in the analysis, and is invariant to the order in which the stations are arranged, which opens up new applications in the automation of seismological tasks and in earthquake early warning systems

Rupture Reactivation during the 2011 M_w 9.0 Tohoku Earthquake: Dynamic Rupture and Ground-Motion Simulations

Near‐source ground‐motion observations and kinematic source inversions suggest that the rupture process of the 2011 M_w 9.0 Tohoku earthquake involved rupture reactivation, that is, repeated rupture nucleation in the same hypocentral area. This unusual phenomenon may have provided a second breath to the rupture that enhanced its final size. Here, we propose that rupture reactivation may have been governed by a slip‐weakening friction model with two sequential strength drops, the second one being activated at large slip. Such frictional behavior has been previously observed in laboratory experiments and attributed to pressurization of fault‐zone fluids by mineral decomposition reactions activated by shear heating, such as dehydration and decarbonation. Further evidence of this double‐slip‐weakening friction model is obtained here from the dynamic stress changes in the hypocentral region derived from a finite source inversion model. We incorporate this friction model in a dynamic rupture simulation comprising two main asperities constrained by source inversion models and several deep small asperities constrained by backprojection source imaging studies. Our simulation produces ground‐motion patterns along the Japanese coast consistent with observations and rupture patterns consistent with a kinematic source model featuring rupture reactivation. The deep small asperities serve as a bridge to connect the two main asperities, and the rupture reactivation mechanism is needed to reproduce the observed ground‐motion pattern. Therefore, we argue that rupture reactivation during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake is consistent with a second strength drop, possibly caused by activation of thermochemical weakening processes at large slip