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Tracking the rupture of the Mw = 9.3 Sumatra earthquake over 1,150 km at teleseismic distance

Nature volume 435, pages 937–939 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

On 26 December 2004, a moment magnitude Mw = 9.3 earthquake occurred along Northern Sumatra, the Nicobar and Andaman islands, resulting in a devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean region1. The rapid and accurate estimation of the rupture length and direction of such tsunami-generating earthquakes is crucial for constraining both tsunami wave-height models as well as the seismic moment of the events. Compressional seismic waves generated at the hypocentre of the Sumatra earthquake arrived after about 12 min at the broadband seismic stations of the German Regional Seismic Network (GRSN)2,3, located approximately 9,000 km from the event. Here we present a modification of a standard array-seismological approach and show that it is possible to track the propagating rupture front of the Sumatra earthquake over a total rupture length of 1,150 km. We estimate the average rupture speed to be 2.3–2.7 km s-1 and the total duration of rupture to be at least 430 s, and probably between 480 and 500 s.

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Figure 1: Station distribution of the German Regional Seismic Network.
Figure 2: Energy maps corresponding to initiation and end of the rupture during the Sumatra earthquake.
Figure 3: Rupture trace of the Sumatra earthquake.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the German seismological central observatory (SZGRF) for supplying the data.

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Author notes

  1. Frank Krüger and Matthias Ohrnberger: *These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geosciences, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24, 14476, Golm, Germany

    Frank Krüger & Matthias Ohrnberger

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  1. Frank Krüger
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  2. Matthias Ohrnberger
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Correspondence to Frank Krüger.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Figure S1

This shows the stacked energy contribution of all 19 high-gain broadband records at GRSN in slowness and backazimuth for a time window containing direct P and PP phase. (PDF 142 kb)

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Krüger, F., Ohrnberger, M. Tracking the rupture of the Mw = 9.3 Sumatra earthquake over 1,150 km at teleseismic distance. Nature 435, 937–939 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03696

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