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Aftershocks halted by static stress shadows

Nature Geoscience volume 5, pages 410–413 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

Earthquakes impart static and dynamic stress changes to the surrounding crust. Sudden fault slip causes small but permanent—static—stress changes, and passing seismic waves cause large, but brief and oscillatory—dynamic—stress changes. Because both static and dynamic stresses can trigger earthquakes within several rupture dimensions of a mainshock, it has proven difficult to disentangle their contributions to the triggering process1,2,3. However, only dynamic stress can trigger earthquakes far from the source4,5, and only static stress can create stress shadows, where the stress and thus the seismicity rate in the shadow area drops following an earthquake6,7,8,9. Here we calculate the stress imparted by the magnitude 6.1 Joshua Tree and nearby magnitude 7.3 Landers earthquakes that occurred in California in April and June 1992, respectively, and measure seismicity through time. We show that, where the aftershock zone of the first earthquake was subjected to a static stress increase from the second, the seismicity rate jumped. In contrast, where the aftershock zone of the first earthquake fell under the stress shadow of the second and static stress dropped, seismicity shut down. The arrest of seismicity implies that static stress is a requisite element of spatial clustering of large earthquakes and should be a constituent of hazard assessment.

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Figure 1: The stress-trigger/stress-shadow imbalance.
Figure 2: Seismicity shutdown in the Landers stress shadow.
Figure 3: Stress shadow imparted to the nodal planes of Joshua Tree aftershocks.
Figure 4: Explanation of immediate and delayed rate drops in the stress shadow.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Kilb, A. Michael, T. Parsons, R. Harris and D. Schorlemmer for guidance and reviews.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, Kyoto 611-0011, Japan

    Shinji Toda

  2. US Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA

    Ross S. Stein

  3. Department of Geophysics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA

    Gregory C. Beroza

  4. ISTerre, Université de Savoie, CNRS, 73376 Le Bourget du Lac, France

    David Marsan

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  1. Shinji Toda
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the ideas and tests pursued in the analysis. G.C.B. discovered the data set and its implications, S.T. designed and carried out most of the calculations, D.M. enhanced the statistical rigour and explained the delayed-shutdown phenomenon and R.S.S. wrote most of the text.

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Correspondence to Shinji Toda.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Toda, S., Stein, R., Beroza, G. et al. Aftershocks halted by static stress shadows. Nature Geosci 5, 410–413 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1465

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