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Seismology

Chasing supershear earthquakes

Nature Geoscience volume 15, pages 863–864 (2022)Cite this article

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This article has been updated

In rare and sometimes highly destructive cases, faults rupture faster than the seismic waves generated can travel. A global investigation of earthquake rupture speeds reveals that these events occur much more frequently than previously thought.

The speed at which an earthquake fault ruptures can vary substantially, and this influences the severity of the ground motion associated with the earthquake1. Sometimes ruptures can propagate faster than the seismic shear waves generated by the earthquake can travel, which is known as supershear rupture. These events can cause localised, strong ground motion, even far away from the fault, as the radiated waves coalesce into a pair of beams (known as a Mach cone) that propagate obliquely from the fault. Observations from supershear earthquakes can provide key information for assessing future earthquake hazards. However, only a small number of these events have ever been identified. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Bao and colleagues2 revisited the seismic data from large, strike-slip earthquakes and find that these events are not as elusive as previously thought.

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Fig. 1: The global distribution of supershear earthquakes.

Change history

  • 03 November 2022

    In the version of this article initially published, there was an error in Figure 1, where the outlines of plate boundaries were incorrectly shifted rightward. The figure has been updated in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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  1. Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan

    Ryo Okuwaki

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  1. Ryo Okuwaki
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Correspondence to Ryo Okuwaki.

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Okuwaki, R. Chasing supershear earthquakes. Nat. Geosci. 15, 863–864 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-01054-6

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