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Limited overlap between the seismic gap and coseismic slip of the great 2010 Chile earthquake
S. Lorito1 *, F. Romano1 , S. Atzori1 , X. Tong2 , A. Avallone1 , J. McCloskey3 , M. Cocco1 , E. Boschi1 and A. Piatanesi1
The Mw 8.8 mega-thrust earthquake and tsunami that occurred on 27 February 2010 offshore the Maule region, Chile, was not unexpected. A clearly identied seismic gap113 existed in an area where tectonic loading has been accumulating since the great 1835 earthquake14 . Here we jointly invert tsunami and geodetic data to derive a robust model for the coseismic slip distribution and induced coseismic stress changes. We compare these with past earthquakes and the preseismic locking distribution13 , to assess if the Maule earthquake has lled the seismic gap. We nd that the main slip patch is located to the north of the gap, overlapping the rupture zone of the Mw 8.0 earthquake that occurred in 1928, with a secondary concentration of slip to the south. The seismic gap was only partially lled and a zone of high preseismic locking remains unbroken, inconsistent with the assumption that distributions of seismic rupture might be correlated with preseismic locking. Moreover, we conclude that increased stress on the unbroken patch may in turn have increased the probability of another major to great earthquake there in the near future. On 27 February 2010 at 06:34:14 utc an earthquake of moment magnitude Mw 8.8 occurred offshore the Maule region, Chile, some 360 km southwest of Santiago, with epicentre at 36.12 S, 72.90 W (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/epic/). The ensuing tsunami caused severe damage along the adjacent coasts, with reported maximum wave heights of more than 10 m at Constitucin (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/hazard/tsu.shtml), and a devastating inundation in Juan Fernndez islands, some 600 km offshore. The earthquake and tsunami claimed together more than 500 lives. The 2010 Maule earthquake ruptured the rapidly converging (6.8 cm yr1 ; ref. 10) interface between the Nazca and South American plates and was the largest mega-thrust earthquake recorded along this segment since the Mw 9.5 1960 Chile shock (Fig. 1). The source zone of the Maule earthquake features heterogeneous but locally high plate coupling13 . Tectonic stress has probably accumulated there continuously since the most recent major (Mw 8.5; ref. 4) subduction earthquake, experienced and described by Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle in 1835 (ref. 14), storing more than 12 m of slip where the interface is fully locked. The more recent Mw 7.9 1939 earthquake was in fact an intra-plate event14 , and the segment between the Mw 9.5 1960 earthquake to the south, and the Mw 8.0 (ref. 4) 1928 earthquake to the north, then contains a well defined seismic gap113 , referred to here as the Darwin gap. The 2010 Maule rupture nucleated close to the coast, producing a significant displacement both on the sea floor and onshore.
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Figure 1 | Location map of the 2010 Maule earthquake and the seismic gap. Geographic location of the 27 February 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule earthquake, with epicentre (red star) between Concepcin and Constitucin in South Central Chile. The green and white beach ball is the United States Geological Survey centroid moment tensor. Yellow stars are the epicentres of 1928, 1939, 1960 and 1985 earthquakes, with their approximate source zones4,7,16,19 , which are shaded for thrust inter-plate events. The 1960 source zone includes both 21 May Mw 7.9 and 22 May Mw 9.5 earthquakes19 . Orange lines are contours of the preseismic locking distribution13 . The segment that probably contains the source zone of the 1835 earthquake (indicated by the black dashed line with arrows) is the zone of the Darwin14 gap, where a major earthquake was expected12 . The red line with triangles is the trench between the Nazca and South America Plates26 . The white arrow indicates the approximate convergence direction of the plates along with its estimated velocity10 .
Tsunami observations provide an indirect measure of the seafloor displacement, whereas geodetic observations (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), Global Positioning System
1 Istituto
Nazionale di Geosica e Vulcanologia, Via di Vigna Murata 605, 00143 Rome, Italy, 2 Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0225, USA, 3 Environmental Sciences Research Institute, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster, Coleraine BT52 1SA, Northern Ireland. *e-mail: stefano.lorito@ingv.it.
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Figure 2 | Slip distribution of the 2010 Maule earthquake. Slip distribution for the 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule earthquake obtained from the joint inversion of tsunami and geodetic data, represented by colours according to the scale at the bottom. White arrows represent the slip direction (rake). Thin black contours indicate the associated surface vertical displacement (1-m-interval solid lines for uplift, 20-cm-interval dashed lines for subsidence). Epicentres and source zones are plotted only for major thrust earthquakes (compare Fig. 1).
(GPS) and land-level changes15 ) enable the estimation of the onshore displacement field. The two data sets possess almost complementary resolving power on the coseismic deformation, from which the characteristics of the earthquake rupture can be inferred. Here we carry out a joint inversion of these data to derive a robust model for the slip distribution, and the subsequent Coulomb stress change over the fault plane. It is usually assumed that high prestress coincides with maxima of locking and elapsed time since the most recent failure. It is also sometimes proposed that the slip distribution of a future earthquake might be correlated with the distribution of prestress13 . We then compare coseismic slip and stress change during the Maule earthquake with the regional prestress distribution as inferred by preseismic locking and slip in past earthquakes. Our purpose is twofold. We assess (1) the extent to which the slip distribution matches the inferred prestress distribution, to test the fundamental hypothesis that the two might be correlated, and (2) the extent to which the Maule event closed the Darwin gap, reducing the seismic hazard in the region. The slip distribution model obtained with the joint inversion of tsunami and geodetic data is shown in Fig. 2 (slip uncertainties
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LETTERS
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Figure 3 | Comparison between observed and predicted data sets. a, Observed and predicted tsunami time series. Peak value (m) is indicated for each station. Abbreviated station names are as in Supplementary Table S2. b, Observed and predicted GPS vectors. Contour lines of predicted vertical displacement as in Fig. 2. Yellow squares indicate positions of land-level-change measurements. c, Observed and predicted land-level changes plotted against latitude scale of b. Error bars for observed data are experimental uncertainties15 , whereas for predicted data they are calculated adding 1 errors (Supplementary Table S1) to the average slip model. d, Residuals between observed and predicted InSAR LOS displacement expressed as percentages of the observed data values.
interseismic period on strongly coupled asperities and released during the earthquake, generating the regions of highest slip. The lobe of strong coupling, which extends from 38.5 S to about 36 S, remained largely unbroken despite its location in the centre of the Darwin gap, whereas the area that experienced the maximum slip of nearly 20 m in the 2010 event overlaps the source region of the 1928 earthquake, although it could only have accumulated some 56 m of slip since then. It is true that most of the regions of high slip in Fig. 4a correspond to regions of relatively high (>50%) coupling, which probably controls the long-term distribution of seismic moment release; however, coupling by
itself provides a poor forecast of the slip and in this case would have even failed to forecast the location experiencing the highest slip. These results suggest that strong coupling is a necessary but not sufficient condition for high slip in a single event. Slip must additionally be controlled by other factors such as friction and fault rheology, structural heterogeneity, and the history of slip on the fault, including aseismic slip, probably over the past several seismic cycles. The Coulomb stress distribution induced on the fault plane by this model of slip during the Maule earthquake is shown in Fig. 4b. The increase in Coulomb stress deeper than 45 km or
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Figure 4 | Comparison of the Maule earthquake slip distribution and coseismic stress variation to preseismic locking and past earthquakes. a, Slip distribution for the Maule earthquake compared with the estimated position of the Darwin gap, in the segment where the 1835 earthquake probably occurred. Source zones of past thrust earthquakes as in Fig. 1. White lines are preseismic locking contours as in Fig. 1. The Darwin gap was only partially lled and a zone of high preseismic locking remains unbroken. b, Coulomb stress changes associated with the Maule earthquake, resolved on the mega-thrust surface. Positive stress changes may favour a future rupture. An increase of stress occurring after the Maule earthquake in the Darwin gap might have increased the probability of a future earthquake there.
shallower than about 15 km in Fig. 4b is unlikely to have strong consequences for seismic and tsunami hazard. The deeper region might be beyond the seismogenic zone limit17 , and large shallow slow earthquakes are unlikely at accretionary margins21 . It might be expected that some afterslip has occurred in both regions but this has not been detected so far. Ongoing geodetic studies will help to address this issue. However, our model shows that not only did the Darwin gap not rupture completely, but the Maule earthquake also produced a strong increase in stress on the highly coupled lobe extending northward from about 37 S to 36 S. Such stress increases have been frequently shown to trigger further large earthquakes22 . In this case, failure of the unbroken areas of the gap, if they are highly coupled, might produce an event of magnitude Mw 7.58. In summary, the Maule earthquake was not the characteristic earthquake that was expected to close the Darwin gap. Whilst the rupture does seem to terminate against the source regions of the 1960 and 1985 earthquakes and the high slip is broadly confined to areas of relatively high coupling, zones of very high coupling in the Darwin gap remain unbroken. Moreover, the highest slip occurs in an area that failed in 1928 that is coupled only at the 5075% level. It is then hard to envisage that preseismic locking might be used for anticipating future slip in seismic gaps. The area of strong plate locking in the Darwin gap that did not fail in this event experienced some 2 MPa of further loading by it. Rather than relaxing accumulated stress in the Darwin gap, reducing near-future seismic hazard there, this strong stress interaction might have increased the probability of another major to great earthquake in the Darwin gap in the near future.
Methods
We use sea-level recordings at 15 coastal tide-gauges around the Pacific Ocean, and at four deep-sea bottom pressure gauges in the open sea (Supplementary Fig. S4). Tide-gauge data are from Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission/United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (http://www.ioc-sealevelmonitoring.org/) and University
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of Hawaii (http://ilikai.soest.hawaii.edu/uhslc/background.html) sea-level data centres. Data providers for each station are listed on these websites, and in Supplementary Table S2. Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami sensor data are from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data centre (http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/). We use 25 stations data from continuous GPS sites managed in South America by the International Global Navigation Satellite Systems Service (http://igscb.jpl.nasa.gov/) and three stations data distributed by the French Centre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueInstitut National des Sciences de lUnivers (INSU, France) through the GPSCOPE portal (https://gpscope.dt.insu.cnrs.fr/), hosted at the Division TechniqueINSU. Using GIPSY-OASIS II v.5.0 software23 , we applied a robust procedure24 to analyse GPS data, consisting of a precise-point-positioning strategy followed by network ambiguity resolution, and, then, by alignment of the daily solutions to ITRF 2005 (ref. 25). For each site, static coseismic offsets are estimated by comparing the average position calculated in the 78 days before the earthquake with the position obtained by the daily solution of the day of the earthquake. The far-field stations are used to define a stable reference frame. In the inversion, we use only the six GPS data closest to the source (Supplementary Table S3). InSAR enables imaging of the relative change of the ground deformation with high resolution and wide coverage soon after the event. For repeat-pass interferometry shorter time span between the satellite acquisitions is preferred to isolate the coseismic signal from the preseismic and postseismic deformation. In the present case the acquisition date ranges from May 2007 to February 2010 before the earthquake, and March 2010 to May 2010 after the earthquake17 . We use ascending and descending L-band images acquired by ALOS PALSAR, a satellite of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (http://www.jaxa.jp/index_e.html), and this provides two Line-Of-Sight (LOS) components of the three-dimensional displacement field (Supplementary Fig. S3). We calibrated InSAR LOS data by means of the GPS data set described above (see also http://supersites.unavco.org/chile.php and ftp://topex.ucsd.edu/pub/chile_eq). We use 34 land-level-change data observed mostly at coastal sites and some at estuarine valleys15 . These data are an estimate, at several sites, of the coseismic displacement produced by the 27 February 2010 earthquake, spanning almost the whole source length (Fig. 3c). Our fault model has variable dip and strike. We sample the cross-section of the subduction zone geometry analysis carried out by Gavin Hayes at the United States Geological Survey (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/subduction_ zone/us2010tfan/), and then develop it along strike, using trench coordinates provided by Peter Bird26 . The fault plane is divided into 200 subfaults of 25 25 km (Supplementary Fig. S5 and Table S1).
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14. Darwin, C. Journal of the Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of the HMS Beagle Round the World 2nd edn (John Murray, 1845). 15. Faras, M. et al. Land-level changes produced by the Mw 8.8 2010 Chilean earthquake. Science 329, 916 (2010). 16. Delouis, B., Nocquet, J-M. & Valle, M. Slip distribution of the February 27, 2010 Mw = 8.8 Maule earthquake, central Chile, from static and high-rate GPS, InSAR, and broadband teleseismic data. Geophys. Res. Lett. 37, L17305 (2010). 17. Tong, X. et al. The 2010 Maule, Chile earthquake: Downdip rupture limit revealed by space geodesy. Geophys. Res. Lett. 37, L24311 (2010). 18. Lay, T. et al. Teleseismic inversion for rupture process of the 27 February 2010 Chile (Mw 8.8) earthquake. Geophys. Res. Lett. 37, L13301 (2010). 19. Moreno, M. S., Bolte, J., Klotz, J. & Melnick, D. Impact of megathrust geometry on inversion of coseismic slip from geodetic data: Application to the 1960 Chile earthquake. Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L16310 (2009). 20. Konca, O. et al. Partial rupture of a locked patch of the Sumatra megathrust during the 2007 earthquake sequence. Nature 456, 631635 (2008). 21. Bilek, S. L. The role of subduction erosion on seismicity. Geology 38, 479480 (2010). 22. Nalbant, S. S., Steacy, S., Sieh, K., Natawidjaja, D. & McCloskey, J. Earthquake risk on the Sunda trench. Nature 435, 756757 (2005). 23. Lichten, S. & Borders, J. Strategies for high-precision Global Positioning System orbit determination. J. Geophys. Res. 92, 1275112762 (1987). 24. DAgostino, N. et al. Active tectonics of the adriatic region from GPS and earthquake slip vectors. J. Geophys. Res. 113, B12413 (2008). 25. Altamimi, Z., Collilieux, X., Legrand, J., Garayt, B. & Boucher, C. ITRF2005: A new release of the international terrestrial reference frame based on time series of station positions and earth orientation parameters. J. Geophys. Res. 112, B09401 (2007). 26. Bird, P. An updated digital model of plate boundaries. Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst. 4, 1027 (2003). 27. Okada, Y. Surface deformation due to shear and tensile faults in a half-space. Bull. Seismol. Soc. Am. 75, 11351154 (1985). 28. Lorito, S., Piatanesi, A., Cannelli, V., Romano, F. & Melini, D. Kinematics and source zone properties of the 2004 SumatraAndaman earthquake and tsunami: Nonlinear joint inversion of tide gauge, satellite altimetry, and GPS data. J. Geophys. Res. 115, B02304 (2010). 29. Lin, J. & Stein, R. S. Stress triggering in thrust and subduction earthquakes, and stress interaction between the southern San Andreas and nearby thrust and strike-slip faults. J. Geophys. Res. 109, B02303 (2004). 30. Toda, S., Stein, R. S., Richards-Dinger, K. & Bozkurt, S. Forecasting the evolution of seismicity in southern California: Animations built on earthquake stress transfer. J. Geophys. Res. 110, B05S16 (2005).
Received 27 July 2010; accepted 31 December 2010; published online 30 January 2011
References
1. Barrientos, S. Is the PichilemuTalcahuano (Chile) a seismic gap? Seismol. Res. Lett. 61, 43 (1990). 2. Campos, J. & Kausel, E. The large 1939 intraplate earthquake of Southern Chile. Seismol. Res. Lett. 61, 43 (1990). 3. Madariaga, R. La Seismicidad de Chile, Fisica de la Tierra, Vol. 10 221258 (Ediciones de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1998). 4. Beck, S., Barrientos, S., Kausel, E. & Reyes, M. Source characteristics of historic earthquakes along the central Chile subduction zone. J. South Am. Earth Sci. 11, 115129 (1998). 5. Klotz, J. et al. Earthquake cycle dominates contemporary crustal deformation in Central and Southern Andes. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 193, 437446 (2001). 6. Ruegg, J. C. et al. Interseismic strain accumulation in south central Chile from GPS measurements, 19961999. Geophys. Res. Lett. 29, 15171520 (2002). 7. Campos, J. et al. A seismological study of the 1835 seismic gap in South Central Chile. Phys. Earth Planet. Iner. 132, 177195 (2002). 8. Brooks, B. A. et al. Crustal motion in the Southern Andes (26 36 S): Do the Andes behave like a microplate? Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst. 4, 1085 (2003). 9. Moreno, M. S., Klotz, J., Melnick, D, Echtler, H. & Bataille, K. Active faulting and heterogeneous deformation across a megathrust segment boundary from GPS data, south central Chile (3639 S). Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst. 9, Q12024 (2008). 10. Vigny, C. et al. Upper plate deformation measured by GPS in the Coquimbo Gap, Chile. Phys. Earth Planet. Iner. 175, 8695 (2009). 11. Ruegg, J. C. et al. Interseismic strain accumulation measured by GPS in the seismic gap between Constitucin and Concepcin in Chile. Phys. Earth Planet. Iner. 175, 7885 (2009). 12. Madariaga, R., Mtois, M., Vigny, C. & Campos, J. Central chile finally breaks. Science 328, 181182 (2010). 13. Moreno, M., Rosenau, M. & Oncken, O. 2010 Maule earthquake slip correlates with pre-seismic locking of Andean subduction zone. Nature 467, 198204 (2010).
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge discussions with our colleagues E. Tinti and A. Herrero about seismic rupture properties, and with S. Nalbant about coseismic stress. We also acknowledge C. Vigny, leader for the acquisition of the GPSCOPE GPS data in Chile. We thank N. DAgostino and E. DAnastasio, who set up and implemented the GPS data processing strategy. We appreciate the effort of our colleagues at Cornell University who developed the tsunami-modelling package. We moreover wish to thank all of the data providers who made this study possible. Some figures were drawn with generic mapping tools (http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/). J.M. acknowledges support from the UK NERC under grant numbers NE/F01161X/1 and NE/H008519/1.
Author contributions
S.L., F.R. and A.P. were involved in all of the phases of this study. S.A., X.T. and A.A. processed, modelled and analysed geodetic data, and wrote part of the Methods. J.M. and M.C. contributed to result interpretation and paper writing. E.B. promoted the experiment, contributed to result interpretation and supported the project.
Additional information
The authors declare no competing financial interests. Supplementary information accompanies this paper on www.nature.com/naturegeoscience. Reprints and permissions information is available online at http://npg.nature.com/reprintsandpermissions. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to S.L.