thumbnail

Apparent break in earthquake scaling due to path and site effects on deep borehole recordings

Journal of Geophysical Research B: Solid Earth
By: , and 

Links

  • The Publications Warehouse does not have links to digital versions of this publication at this time
  • Download citation as: RIS | Dublin Core

Abstract

We reexamine the scaling of stress drop and apparent stress, rigidity times the ratio between seismically radiated energy to seismic moment, with earthquake size for a set of microearthquakes recorded in a deep borehole in Long Valley, California. In the first set of calculations, we assume a constant Q and solve for the corner frequency and seismic moment. In the second set of calculations, we model the spectral ratio of nearby events to determine the same quantities. We find that the spectral ratio technique, which can account for path and site effects or nonconstant Q, yields higher stress drops, particularly for the smaller events in the data set. The measurements determined from spectral ratios indicate no departure from constant stress drop scaling down to the smallest events in our data set (Mw 0.8). Our results indicate that propagation effects can contaminate measurements of source parameters even in the relatively clean recording environment of a deep borehole, just as they do at the Earth's surface. The scaling of source properties of microearthquakes made from deep borehole recordings may need to be reevaluated.
Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title Apparent break in earthquake scaling due to path and site effects on deep borehole recordings
Series title Journal of Geophysical Research B: Solid Earth
Volume 108
Issue 5
Year Published 2003
Language English
Larger Work Type Article
Larger Work Subtype Journal Article
Larger Work Title Journal of Geophysical Research B: Solid Earth
Google Analytic Metrics Metrics page
Additional publication details