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A scaling law for slow earthquakes

Nature volume 447, pages 76–79 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

Recently, a series of unusual earthquake phenomena have been discovered, including deep episodic tremor1, low-frequency earthquakes2, very-low-frequency earthquakes3, slow slip events4 and silent earthquakes5,6,7,8,9. Each of these has been demonstrated to arise from shear slip, just as do regular earthquakes, but with longer characteristic durations and radiating much less seismic energy. Here we show that these slow events follow a simple, unified scaling relationship that clearly differentiates their behaviour from that of regular earthquakes. We find that their seismic moment is proportional to the characteristic duration and their moment rate function is constant, with a spectral high-frequency decay of f-1. This scaling and spectral behaviour demonstrates that they can be thought of as different manifestations of the same phenomena and that they comprise a new earthquake category. The observed scale dependence of rupture velocity for these events can be explained by either a constant low-stress drop model or a diffusional constant-slip model. This new scaling law unifies a diverse class of slow seismic events and may lead to a better understanding of the plate subduction process and large earthquake generation.

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Figure 1: Various types of earthquakes and their mechanisms along the Nankai trough, western Japan.
Figure 2: Comparison between seismic moment and the characteristic duration of various slow earthquakes in Table 1 .
Figure 3: Characteristics of moment rate spectrum of slow earthquakes.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Vidale for comments. This work is supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, the Ministry of Education, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan, and the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of Tokyo, Hongo 7-3-1, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan,

    Satoshi Ide & Takahiko Uchide

  2. Department of Geophysics, 397 Panama Mall, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-2215, USA,

    Gregory C. Beroza & David R. Shelly

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  1. Satoshi Ide
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  2. Gregory C. Beroza
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  4. Takahiko Uchide
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Correspondence to Satoshi Ide.

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Ide, S., Beroza, G., Shelly, D. et al. A scaling law for slow earthquakes. Nature 447, 76–79 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05780

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