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Tsunami-triggering quakes can weaken fault zones worldwide | US seismologists have found evidence that the massive 2004
earthquake that triggered killer tsunamis throughout the Indian Ocean weakened at least a portion of California 's famed San Andreas Fault, which suggests that
large quakes can weaken fault zones worldwide. The results suggest that the Earth's
largest earthquakes can weaken fault zones worldwide and may trigger periods of
increased global seismic activity. "An unusually high number of magnitude 8 earthquakes
occurred worldwide in 2005 and 2006," said study co-author Fenglin Niu, associate
professor of Earth science at Rice University . "There has been speculation that
these were somehow triggered by the Sumatran-Andaman earthquake that occurred
on Dec. 26, 2004, but this is the first direct evidence that the quake could change
fault strength of a fault remotely," he added. Earthquakes are caused when a fault
fails, either because of the buildup of stress or because of the weakening of
the fault. The latter is more difficult to measure. The magnitude 9 earthquake
in 2004 occurred beneath the ocean west of Sumatra and was the second-largest
quake ever measured by seismograph. The temblor spawned tsunamis as large as 100
feet that killed an estimated 230,000, mostly in Indonesia , Sri Lanka , India
and Thailand . In the new study, Niu and co-authors Taka'aki Taira and Paul Silver,
both of the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington, D.C., and Robert Nadeau
of the University of California, Berkeley, examined more than 20 years of seismic
records from Parkfield, California, which sits astride the San Andreas Fault.
The team zeroed in on a set of repeating microearthquakes that occurred near Parkfield
over two decades. Each of these tiny quakes originated in almost exactly the same
location. By closely comparing seismic readings from these quakes, the team was
able to determine the "fault strength" - the shear stress level required to cause
the fault to slip - at Parkfield between 1987 and 2008. The team found fault strength
changed markedly at three times during the 20-year period. Eventually, they were
able to narrow the onset of the third shift to a five-day window in late December
2004, during which the Sumatran quake occurred. "The long-range influence of the
2004 Sumatran-Andaman earthquake on this patch of the San Andreas suggests that
the quake may have affected other faults, bringing a significant fraction of them
closer to failure," said Taira. "This hypothesis appears to be borne out by the
unusually high number of large earthquakes that occurred in the three years after
the Sumatran-Andaman quake," Taira added. |
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