Geol 333

Seismology Fundamentals
Contributions of Seismology to Plate Tectonics

 Earthquakes will characterize the present-day motions of the lithosphere, while

geology and paleomagnetics describe motions in the past.

Question: what principle says that plate tectonics should operate now as it has
in the past? Could there be exceptions?

 Simply locating earthquakes on the globe shows a rough outline of plates and
their boundaries.
 We can analyze earthquakes to describe the type or mechanism of plate-tectonic
deformations.
 Finding a mechanism for plate-tectonic motions requires knowledge of the
earth's interior. Seismology gives the most detailed characterizations of structure
and composition.

Describing Earthquakes

(J. Louie) Relative motions cause rocks to strain out of shape, generating elastic stress.
When the stress exceeds the strength of the fault zone, the accumulated strain will
suddenly release in an earthquake.
Question: what does the term elastic imply about the mathematical relation between
stress and strain?
Question: does the length of the rebound curvature tell you anything about the fault
above?
The sudden release of stored elastic potential energy during an earthquake releases both
heat energy and seismic waves. The total energy is called the moment M0.

By essentially taking the logarithm of the moment, we can create a magnitude rating.
Every earthquake has a unique total energy, and therefore a unique magnitude.

Question: what is the magnitude of the largest earthquake ever? The largest possible?
The smallest?

Seismic Waves

(J. Louie) The part of the elastic energy radiated from an earthquake as seismic waves
takes two forms, compressional and shear.

(J. Louie) Sensitive seismographs record the passing ground motions of the seismic
waves with respect to time, noting the motions of an inertial mass against the moving
ground.
On seismograms it is easy to separate P-waves from S-waves because they travel at
different speeds, Vp and Vs:

where k is the incompressibility property of the rock, is the rigidity (or resistance to
shear), and is the density.

Question: why will P-waves arrive first at a seismograph, and S-waves later?
Question: as rocks age and become more deeply buried, Vp and Vs generally increase.
Why?

Locating Earthquakes

Most terrestrial rocks are nearly Poisson solids, for

which the ratio Vs/Vp is close to the square root of
three. In subtracting the arrival time at a
seismograph of the P wave from the arrival time of
the S wave (to find the S-P time ), this fact
means that you can multiply the S-P time by a
factor a 8 km/s to get a generally reliable estimate
of the distance of the earthquake from the
seismograph.

Given the fairly constant relation between and distance, you can use the above
empirical equation with a calibrated seismograph to estimate an earthquake's magnitude.

(from Kearey & Vine, copyright Blackwell Sci. Publ.) Of course the distance we get
from the S-P time is the distance along the travel path of the seismic waves, so we have
to adjust for the earth's spherical shape.

(J. Louie) Given the S-P times and distances of an earthquake from three stations, we
can triangulate to find its location.

Question: why do we need at least three stations to get a location?

Question: how would location errors appear? What earthquakes are likely to have the
greatest location errors?
(from USGS) Simply locating earthquakes around the world over the past 100 years
(black dots above) produces a striking pattern. Earthquakes are not evenly spread
around the earth, but occur in continuous but thin belts or zones surrounding areas of far
lower seismicity. Thus on the earth tectonic deformation is largely confined to zones of
interaction between apparently rigid regions. Note that the pattern is more diffuse on the
continents than it is in the oceans.

Question: are there any cultural or technological factors affecting the earthquake
distributions on this map?

Earthquake Mechanisms
 (J. Louie) Knowing where the seismically-active zones are tells
us what regions are currently deforming tectonically, but it does
not tell us anything about the nature of the deformation. There
are these three fundamental types of deformation; we can create
any type of faulting by mixing them in different proportions.
All of these faults are shear or sliding dislocations that produce
no net volume change or net rotation. Only two opposing force
couples can produce such motion. Very few earthquakes have
been shown to result from volume changes, or from single
forces.

Question: what are the directions of the maximum and

minimum principal strains for each mechanism?

(from Kearey & Vine, copyright Blackwell Sci. Publ.) From the focus of an earthquake,
the two types of body waves (P and S), and two types of surface waves (Love and
Rayleigh, which are S-waves trapped near the surface) radiate in all directions.
(from Kearey & Vine, copyright Blackwell Sci. Publ.) The body waves do not radiate in
all directions with the same strength, however. Above are radial plots of relative wave
amplitude in all directions in a plane through a shear dislocation, or double couple. The
P-wave radiation pattern at left shows that the strongest compressions (C) and
dilatations (D) radiate at 45 degree angles from the fault plane. The S-wave radiation
pattern at right shows that the strongest shear waves radiate at directions parallel and
perpendicular to the fault plane.

(from Kearey & Vine, copyright Blackwell Sci. Publ.) The double-couple origin of
earthquake motions divides the area around the focus into quadrants revealing different
directions of motion. For the P-wave recordings above, initial motions will be up if the
wave originated in a compressive quadrant, and down if from a dilatational quadrant.
Note that two planes separate the quadrants: the real fault plane; and an
indistinguishable auxiliary plane. The object of finding an earthquake focal mechanism
is to describe the orientations of these planes.
(from Kearey & Vine, copyright Blackwell Sci. Publ.) What seismographs record
radiation from which quadrant depends on the location and depth of the focus, the
orientation of the fault plane, and the paths the waves take to the seismographs.

(from Kearey & Vine, copyright Blackwell Sci. Publ.) To estimate a focal mechanism
we pick the direction of P-wave motion (up and compressional, or down and
dilatational) at each seismograph, find the azimuth of each ray from the locations of the
event and the seismograph, and estimate the takeoff angle of each ray from the locations
and ray projections through earth structure models. Each C or D pick is plotted in lower-
hemisphere projection on an equal-area stereonet. With that data we try to find a unique
strike and dip for the mutually-perpendicular fault and auxiliary planes on the stereonet.
 Question: why is it most
convenient to use the lower-
hemisphere projection?
(from Kearey & Vine,
copyright Blackwell Sci.
Publ.) At left is the result of
the fitting process for some
strike-slip earthquake. All
the compressional picks
should land in the dark compressional quadrants,
and all the dilatational picks should land in the light
quadrants. Note the double-couple, and the fact that
we cannot tell whether this was a north-striking
left-lateral fault, or an east-striking right-lateral
fault.

(from Kearey & Vine, copyright Blackwell Sci. Publ.) At left is the focal mechanism of
a thrust earthquake, and below are cross sections showing the two possibilities for fault
motion allowed by this mechanism. From the mechanism alone, the strike and dip of the
actual fault break is ambiguous.

Note that the centers of the compressional wave quadrants are at a direction
perpendicular to the axis of the maximum compressional strain. So the compressional
axes appear in the dilatational wave quadrants.

(from Kearey & Vine, copyright Blackwell Sci. Publ.) At left is the mechanism of an
extensional normal fault earthquake, with the two faulting possibilities below.
Question: what other data could we use to resolve the ambiguity between the fault and
auxiliary planes?

The map above shows hundreds of mechanisms determined by a group at Harvard for
the Tibet and Himalaya region. Each mechanism is a lower-hemisphere projection with
the compressional quadrant darkened. The dots locate the compressional axis directions.
(Click for G. Ekstrom's original 1.5 Mbyte PostScript file at Harvard, or here for a 0.73
Mbyte viewable PDF file. Used here by permission)
Question: identify a strike-slip, a normal-fault, and a thrust-fault mechanism on the
map above, and describe at least three different mixed-mode mechanisms.
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