LETTERS
PUBLISHED ONLINE: 20 JUNE 2010 | DOI: 10.1038/NGEO885
Stress transfer in the Tokai subduction zone from
the 2009 Suruga Bay earthquake in Japan
S. Aoi *, B. Enescu, W. Suzuki, Y. Asano, K. Obara † , T. Kunugi and K. Shiomi
Southwestern Japan lies at the boundary between the
subducting Philippine Sea plate and the overriding Eurasian
plate. A magnitude 8 megathrust earthquake ruptured the
Tonankai and Nankai segments in 1944 and 1946, respectively,
but the neighbouring Tokai segment of the plate boundary
remained locked1 . A large megathrust earthquake in the Tokai
region has therefore been expected. In 2009, a magnitude 6.4
earthquake took place in Suruga Bay, within the Philippine Sea
subducting plate, close to the Tokai segment. Here, we use a
fault-slip model to examine the impact of the stress changes2
caused by the Suruga Bay event on the Tokai segment. We show
that the occurrence rate of plate-boundary seismicity increased
following the earthquake. Most of the presumed strongly
locked patches of the Tokai segment are located within areas
of increased stress. Rupturing of a locked patch—following a
threshold level of seismic stress—could trigger the rupture of
the entire Tokai segment, leading to a megathrust earthquake.
Megathrust earthquakes in southwest Japan occur at intervals
of 100–200 years1 on the top surface of the Philippine Sea plate
subducting from the Nankai–Suruga trough. The magnitude-, M-,
8-class earthquake seismogenic zone is divided into three main
segments (Fig. 1). Two megathrust earthquakes struck along the
Nankai trough in 1944 and 1946; however, the Tokai segment
did not rupture at that time and it is still in a locked state. In
contrast, all three zones ruptured in 1854 (when two megathrust
events occurred within a time period of ∼30 h) and 1707. Therefore,
the occurrence of the anticipated Tokai earthquake is of great
concern for earthquake hazard assessment in the region. The Large
Scale Earthquake Countermeasures Act established in Japan in 1978
recognized officially the importance of mitigating the effects of this
anticipated megathrust event.
In the decades before the occurrence of a megathrust earthquake,
precursory reverse fault (compression-type) events often take place
within the oceanic plate, oceanward of the source region of the
major event3 . The 2009 Suruga Bay earthquake (M6.4), which
occurred within the Philippine Sea plate and had a reverse fault
component, could be the result of tectonic-stress accumulation
that has reached some critical level in the neighbouring, locked
Tokai source region.
The earthquake hypocentres of the Suruga Bay sequence
(mainshock and aftershock activity) were precisely relocated by the
double-difference method4 using NIED’s Hi-net5 data (Fig. 2a–c;
Methods and Supplementary Note S1). We can see a two-plane-
shaped hypocentral distribution of aftershocks, indicating that the
sequence occurred along two faults, located in the southern (Fault I)
and northern (Fault II) parts of the aftershock area and dipping to
southeast and northeast, respectively. The mainshock hypocentre
is located on the southern fault. The space-time evolution of the
Suruga Bay sequence (Fig. 2d) shows that the aftershocks that
National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, 3-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0006, Japan. † Present address: Earthquake
Research Institute, The University of Tokyo, 1-1-1 Yayoi, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0032, Japan. *e-mail: aoi@bosai.go.jp.
496
© 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
occurred within 30 min from the mainshock are widely distributed
along and around both faults. This indicates that the mainshock
started at its hypocentre on the southern fault and the rupture
transferred to the northern fault.
On the basis of this two-plane-fault model, we estimated the
earthquake rupture process with a multi-time-window inversion
scheme6 , using near-source strong-motion data from NIED’s
K-NET and KiK-net5 stations (Methods). Large slip areas extend
around the connecting point of Faults I and II (Fig. 3; Supple-
mentary Note S2). Fault I, which ruptured first, was dominated
by strike–slip, whereas Fault II underwent predominantly reverse
faulting motion. So far there have been only a few reports of
earthquakes rupturing two conjugate fault planes simultaneously7 .
In the case of the Suruga Bay event, the high stress concentration
generated by the large slip on Fault I that occurred nearby the
connecting point probably gave rise to the rupture of the conjugate
Fault II. The total seismic moment is 4.35 × 1018 Nm (moment
magnitude 6.4) and the seismic moments released from the two
faults are comparable.
The slip model previously described was used to calculate the co-
seismic Coulomb failure stress changes2 (hereafter 1CFS; see Meth-
ods) caused by the Suruga Bay earthquake on the presumed Tokai
fault area (Fig. 4a; Supplementary Movie S1). Red and blue denote
zones of stress increase and decrease, respectively. The ‘eggplant’-
shaped source region of the anticipated Tokai earthquake and the
depth contours of the upper boundary of the subducting Philippine
Sea plate (Fig. 4a) are based on the study of plate configuration
and historical earthquake records, and used in official seismic-risk
evaluation by the Japanese government8 (Supplementary Note S1).
The rake at any given location in the source area was determined
by consideration of the plate motion direction. The average rake
direction is indicated by a thick arrow in Fig. 4a. Considering
the uncertainty of the slip model, we did not use in the 1CFS
calculations the relatively small slip on the northern fault plane that
is shallower than the Tokai fault plane. Stress change estimates are
predominantly positive in inland regions northwest of the Suruga
Bay hypocentre, exceeding 0.1 MPa up to ∼8 km from the tip of the
faults and gradually tapering off to around 0.03 MPa at ∼15 km.
The analysis9 of background seismic activities and focal
mechanisms within the subducting Philippine Sea slab revealed
the presence of a relatively large locked zone along the plate
boundary. In ref. 10 it was found that the slow-slip event that
took place in the Tokai region11 from 2000 to 2005 produced
distinct activation and quiescent seismicity patterns within the
Philippine Sea plate. The authors assumed that the seismicity
increase was the result of the slow-slip event quasistatic slip on
the plate interface and reflected the stress concentrations in some
strongly locked patches at the plate boundary, which they defined as
asperities (Supplementary Note S1). They used GPS measurements
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NATURE GEOSCIENCE DOI: 10.1038/NGEO885 LETTERS
Altitude (m)
3,000
36
400
Tokyo
200
120
40 Nagoya
0
¬500
35
¬1,500 Osaka
¬2,500
¬3,500 Figs. 2 and 3 Sag
Tokai ami
¬4,500 trou
gh
Latitude (° N)

Fig. 4
34
Tonankai
??

4
4 185
33
Nankai 194

h
ug
a tro 7
32 rug 170
i–Su 6
ka 194 Eurasian plate

Nan 4
185
Pacific
0 100 Philippine plate
(km) Sea plate

31
132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141
Longitude (° E)

Figure 1 | Map showing the seismogenic zone of interplate megathrust earthquakes along the Nankai–Suruga trough, Japan. This large region can be
divided into three segments, Tokai, Tonankai and Nankai (areas outlined by thick, grey lines); M-8-class megathrust earthquakes have repeatedly ruptured
these segments, with inter-event times of 100–200 years, for example ref. 1. The 2009 Suruga Bay earthquake, whose faults are shown by two red
rectangles, occurred at the eastern edge of the seismogenic zone. The small and large dark green rectangles indicate the regions shown in Figs 2 and 3, and
in Fig. 4, respectively.

to confirm the proposed asperity model (grey-shadowed rectangles
in Fig. 4a). The asperities can be understood as strong, highly
stressed patches of material along the plate interface that will
eventually rupture when their stressing state reaches a critical
threshold value. The increased 1CFS in the inland regions discussed
above takes place within this presumably locked zone. Five (of a
total of six) asperities are located in areas of increased stress. As
discussed in previous studies, for example ref. 12, stress increases
(>0.01 MPa) have been shown to bring faults to failure, with
delays ranging from seconds to decades. The 1CFS on the asperity
that is closest to the Suruga Bay fault region has values that are
significantly larger than 0.01 MPa (Fig. 4a). The other asperities
experience smaller stress changes of up to 0.01 MPa. Note that only
a relative stress increase is not enough to trigger earthquakes; this
depends on how close faults are to failure at the moment of the stress
change, which is generally unknown.
Our 1CFS results are not sensitive to small changes of slip on the
Suruga Bay fault, but rather depend on the amplitude and position
of the large slip concentrations, which were found to be stable in the
slip inversion analysis. We carried out more analysis to check the
stability of the stress changes. The slip was inverted by considering
only one rupture plane, with the same strike angle as Fault II,
but a larger area that accommodates the extent of the aftershock
distribution; the same overall 1CFS pattern was found as for our
preferred two-fault plane model. In addition, the 1CFS amplitudes
are similar, except for the immediate vicinity of the Suruga Bay fault
planes, where the fault plane geometry has an important influence
(Supplementary Note S3).
The earthquake-induced 1CFS can have both permanent
and transient effects on future seismicity rates and earthquake
occurrence probabilities13 . A permanent increase (or decrease) in
the Coulomb stress on a fault plane shortens (or lengthens) the time
to failure by an amount equivalent to the length of time the tectonic
loading would require to bring about a similar stress change. Quan-
titative evaluation of the time advance would require knowledge
of the tectonic stressing rates in the asperities, which are difficult
to obtain using current data. The backslip rate distribution at the
plate boundary, inverted from geodetic measurements14 , is too
smooth for estimating the stressing rates on the seismicity-derived
asperities. The rate- and state-dependent friction law15 predicts
the presence of a transient effect (Methods), which is the largest
immediately after the stress change, and is considerably greater in
magnitude than the permanent effect, but diminishes exponentially
with time16 . This effect can have important consequences not only
on the occurrence of smaller-size aftershocks, but also on the
probability of relatively large future earthquakes13,17,18 .
Simple, but realistic, calculations (Methods) show that in areas
that underwent stress changes of 0.1 MPa the seismicity rate can
be ∼9.4 times higher, three months after the mainshock, relative
to what it would be without the stress change. Even for stress
changes of 0.03 MPa, the forecasted seismicity rate, three months
after, is ∼2.0 times higher. The rate estimations should, however be
interpreted with care. As documented in previous studies, the rate
changes are sensitive to the choice of Aσ (where A is a rate-and-state
parameter and σ is the normal stress), as well as the aftershock
duration ta . As we show in Supplementary Note S4, for a stress
change of 0.1 MPa, and taking uncertainties of the two parameters,
Aσ and ta , into account, the rate after three months from the
mainshock can be between 2.4 and 10.2 times higher than the rate
before the mainshock.
In the days immediately following the Suruga Bay earthquake, a
cluster of thrust earthquakes, M ∼ 2.0 (orange circles in Fig. 4a),
occurred within a highly concentrated zone, which was ∼15 km
away from the Suruga Bay faults and close to the plate boundary. For

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© 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
LETTERS NATURE GEOSCIENCE DOI: 10.1038/NGEO885

a
Moment tensor P-wave polarity

00
B’
2 4 6
34.9 Magnitude
34.9
A
Latitude (° N)
tI
Faul
B A

Latitude (° N)
34.8 Fa lt I
ult A’ Fau
II

34.8 Fa
ult
10 km II
34.7
138.3 138.4 138.5 138.6
Longitude (° E)

10.0 15.0 20.0 22.5 25.0 27.5 30.0 35.0 10 km

Depth (km) 34.7
c 138.3 138.4 138.5 138.6
b 0
A’ A
0
B’ B Longitude (° E)

5 5
0 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00
10 10 Slip (m)

Figure 3 | Source model. The slip distribution is indicated by contour lines

Depth (km)

Depth (km)

15 15
with a 0.25 m interval (see also Supplementary Note S2). The star and
20 20 circle indicate the rupture initiation point (hypocentre) and the connecting
point of Faults I and II, respectively. Blue and red beach-balls show the focal
25 25 mechanisms estimated from the moment tensor inversion and P-wave
polarity analysis, respectively.
30 30
triggered on the plate boundary by the Suruga Bay earthquake.
35 35 We have investigated the possibility of interplate triggering in
0 5 0 5 10 more detail. We searched for events that occurred within location
Distance (km) Distance (km)
uncertainty bounds from the plate interface, one month before and
after the Suruga Bay earthquake, using the Hi-net catalogue data
d
(Methods). We eliminated the earthquakes within 2 km from the
00

2 4 6 Suruga Bay faults because at such distances the 1CFS could be

34.9 Magnitude affected by uncertainties in the slip distribution. Figure 4a shows
the interplate earthquakes detected in the month after the Suruga
Latitude (° N)

34.8 Fa
ult
II
34.7
138.3
0 0.5
Figure 2 | Suruga Bay seismic sequence. a, Hypocentres of the mainshock
and aftershocks are shown by bold and thin circles, respectively. The
symbol size and colour scale indicate the magnitude and depth of
earthquakes, respectively. The two rectangles are the faults coloured
according to the depth variation along their dip. b,c, Vertical cross-sections
show the hypocentre distribution across the strike directions of Fault I (b)
and Fault II (c). Dashed lines indicate the two faults. d, The green contour
circle shows the mainshock. The other circles denote the aftershocks. The
symbol size and colour scale indicate the magnitude and occurrence time
relative to the mainshock, respectively.
all events with well determined focal mechanism, the 1CFS resolved
on the nodal plane consistent with the dip of the subducting
slab was found to be positive. This suggests that the cluster was
lt I Bay event. Comparing the interplate seismicity (M > 0.0) rate before
Fau
and after the Suruga Bay earthquake we found a sudden increase
immediately after the mainshock; the relative increase is most
pronounced spatially close to the Suruga Bay fault region, in an
area indicated by an ellipse in Fig. 4a and referred to as ‘Cluster 1’
(see also Supplementary Note S5). Figure 4b shows the cumulative
10 km number of earthquakes that occurred within the Cluster 1 area.
138.4 138.5 138.6 The seismicity has a clear relative increase after the Suruga Bay
Longitude (° E) earthquake, followed by a gradual decay with time (Methods). Most
of the interplate earthquakes that occurred after the Suruga Bay
1 2 24 earthquake within Cluster 1 are located in areas of positive 1CFS
Elapsed time (h) (Fig. 4a). These findings strongly suggest the triggering of interplate
events by the Suruga Bay earthquake. Estimations of seismicity rate
changes at the plate interface validate the range of the rate-and-state
forecasts previously discussed (Supplementary Note S5). The same
relationship between a stress increase and a transient rise in seismic
activities should apply to earthquakes of larger magnitudes2 , not
necessarily the smaller shocks, which are more frequent.
The increase of stress in some of the locked portions on the
plate interface implies, in the short term, a higher seismicity rate
and an increased chance of larger interplate earthquakes. Most
of the presumed asperities on the Tokai fault plane are located
in areas of stress increase and one of them, situated close to the
fault region of the Suruga Bay earthquake, experienced significantly
large 1CFS values. The breakage of an asperity could eventually
trigger the rupture over the entire fault plane, leading to a major
interplate earthquake.

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NATURE GEOSCIENCE DOI: 10.1038/NGEO885 LETTERS
a 35.5 b

Suruga Bay earthquake

60

Occurrence of the
Mt. Fuji 50

Cumulative number
15
40

20
25
Suruga 30
35.0 Bay
30 Izu 20
peninsula
Latitude (° N)

10
25
0
12/7 19/7 26/7 02/8 09/8 16/8 23/8 30/8 06/9 13/9
Time (day/month)
34.5 20
trough
0.1
15
10

0.01
Suruga

ΔCFS (MPa)
Average
rake angle 0.001
Pacific 0
plate ¬0.001
0 10 20 Philippine
(km) Sea plate ¬0.01
34.0
137.5 138.0 138.5 139.0 ¬0.1
Longitude (° E)

Figure 4 | Stress changes in the Tokai source area and triggered seismicity. a, The ‘eggplant’-shaped source region is delimited by a bold solid line.
Positive (red) and negative (blue) stress changes are shown in a logarithmic scale. Contours indicate the depths of the plate boundary. The thick arrow
indicates the average slip direction on the presumed Tokai fault plane and grey shaded rectangles show presumed asperities9,10 . Several overlapping
orange circles indicate the epicentres of plate-boundary earthquakes with a thrust-type focal mechanism. Green circles indicate interplate earthquakes
occurring in the Tokai source area, in the month after the Suruga Bay earthquake. The area of significant seismicity increase after the mainshock is shown
as a dotted ellipse (Cluster 1). Dotted rectangles show the conjugate faults of the Suruga Bay earthquake. b, Cumulative number of earthquakes (Cluster 1
area) occurring one month before to one month after the Suruga Bay earthquake. The red line shows a modified Omori-law fit to the data after the Suruga
Bay earthquake (Methods).

Methods Transient effects of stress change. Following a rate- and state-dependent

Earthquake relocation. We determined highly accurate hypocentre locations for
the Suruga Bay earthquake sequence (mainshock and aftershock activity occurring
from 11 to 20 August 2009) using the double-difference relocation algorithm4 .
The method minimizes the residuals between observed and theoretical travel-time
differences for all event-station pairs, thus reducing the errors caused by the
unmodelled velocity structure. We used the hypocentres routinely determined
by Hi-net as initial locations, and the 1D velocity structure for the Kanto–Tokai
region19 . The data set consists of 95,861 P- and 90,856 S-wave arrival times of 864
earthquakes recorded at 28 seismic stations located within an epicentral distance
of 100 km. Differential travel times were obtained directly from the manually
picked arrival times, as well as from waveform cross-correlation of 3–20 Hz
band-pass-filtered, 1.5-s-long velocity seismograms.
Mainshock rupture process. The rupture process was estimated by applying the
multi-time-window linear waveform inversion method6 to the strong-motion
waveforms recorded by six K-NET and seven KiK-net stations, located within
50 km from the epicentre. We assumed a fault model that consists of two conjugate
(that is, orthogonal) planes: the southeast-dipping plane in the southern source
area (Fault I), which corresponds to the nodal plane of the source mechanism
determined from P-wave polarity analysis of Hi-net data, and the northeast-dipping
plane in the northern area (Fault II), which is adapted from the nodal plane of
the F-net5 moment-tensor solution (Fig. 3). The two faults intersect at an angle
of 81◦ (Supplementary Note S2). These fault planes were discretized in square
subfaults of 2 × 2 km size, and the moment release at each point was represented
by using seven 0.8 s time windows separated by 0.4 s. Inverted data were 13-s-long
S-wave portions of velocity waveforms, 0.1–1 Hz band-pass filtered. The Green
functions were calculated using the discrete wavenumber method20 and the
reflection/transmission-coefficient matrix method21 using a horizontally layered
structure model. The synthetic waveforms agree with the observed ones fairly well
(Supplementary Note S2).
Coulomb stress-change calculations. The static Coulomb failure-stress change2 is
calculated by 1CFS = 1τ + µ0 1σ , where 1τ is the shear-stress change (positive
in the direction of fault slip), 1σ is the normal-stress change (positive if the fault
is unclamped) and µ0 is the apparent coefficient of friction, which is set to be 0.4
in this study. We have checked the stability of our stress pattern for µ0 values from
0.2 to 0.8 (Supplementary Note S3). The Coulomb 3.1 software22 was used for
the 1CFS computations.
friction-law formulation15 , the earthquake rate, R, at time t after a stress
step is obtained using the formula R(t ) = a/(b + t ), with a = r × ta and
b = ta × exp(−1CFS/Aσ ). r is the background rate before the stress step. We are
interested here in the relative seismicity rate after the mainshock, R/r. We adopt
Aσ = 0.04 MPa, in agreement with values obtained directly from the inversion of
aftershock data, for example refs 13,23. The aftershock duration, ta , was set at 10.2
years, which is a global average found in the Global CMT catalogue, dominated
by subduction-zone events17 . Supplementary Note S4 discusses in more detail
the uncertainties of the Aσ and ta parameters, as well as their influence on the
forecasted seismicity rate changes.
Analysis of interplate seismicity. We selected from the Hi-net catalogue all
earthquakes (M > 0.0) that are located within Dp = 3 km distance from the Tokai
fault plane and occurred one month before and after the Suruga Bay earthquake.
This distance was considered to account for the hypocentral errors associated
with these earthquakes, especially their depths, as well as uncertainties of the
plate-boundary location. The stability of results was checked for Dp values between
2 and 4 km. We fitted the decay of interplate seismicity (Cluster 1) rates after the
Suruga Bay earthquake by the modified Omori law24 : n(t ) = k/(t +c)p (n is the rate
at time t after the mainshock and k,c and p are parameters), which describes the
power-law temporal decay of aftershocks. The parameters k = 11.7,c = 0.96 days
and p = 0.91 were determined using a maximum-likelihood procedure25 (for a
discussion of these parameters see Supplementary Note S5). The determined k,c
and p values were used to fit the cumulative number of events after the Suruga Bay
earthquake (red curve in Fig. 4b).
Received 5 October 2009; accepted 10 May 2010; published online
20 June 2010
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Acknowledgements
We thank Y. Okada, S. Hainzl, S. Matsumura, H. Hirose, Y. Ben-Zion, M. Imoto,
S. Noguchi, Z. Peng and T. Miyoshi for discussions and reviews of the manuscript.
M. Matsubara provided information on the focal mechanism of the triggered
seismicity. The suggestions of T. Tada were helpful to improve the clarity and
conciseness of the text.
Author contributions
S.A. and B.E. conceived the analysis and wrote the paper. S.A., B.E., W.S. and Y.A. carried
out the analysis. All the authors contributed to the observations.
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.A.
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