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Rupturing of small natural earthquakes in West Bohemia investigated by source scanning

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Abstract

The source scanning method allows for not only the automated determination of the earthquake locations but also the study of the earthquake source processes. It is based on shifting seismograms back in time by the travel times and capitalizes on summing them over the seismic stations. In this way, it produces a brightness field. Using the results from synthetic seismogram tests, we show that the vector from the hypocenter to the brightspot equals a vector of the unilateral earthquake rupture propagation. We apply source scanning to study rupturing of 12 natural West Bohemian (the Czech Republic, Central Europe) earthquakes in a magnitude range from 1.6 to 3.7 recorded by the WEBNET (up to 23 stations at epicentral distances of up to approximately 25 km). The travel times were calculated by the ray method and adjusted by adding the location arrival-time residuals. The normalized envelopes of the vertical component of the direct P wave velocity seismograms were used for source scanning. We estimated the rupture direction and identified which nodal plane was the fault plane from the brightness field for each of the earthquakes. The reliable outcomes of the rupture direction estimation had the rupture azimuth to be towards the north and the southeast. Upward rupturing was found for 11 earthquakes, whereas downward rupturing occurred in only 1 earthquake. The method is useful as an auxiliary method for fault plane identification.

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source models with unilateral rupturing. The source is plotted as a red arrow

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Notes

  1. NKC and NKCN are referred to as 2 stations for simplicity, although they are 2 seismometers at a single station (Fischer et al. 2010).

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Acknowledgements

The Institute of Geophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences provided us with the seismograms, equipped us with computers and software, and funded the research. We thank Václav Vavryčuk for providing the computer code for ray tracing and supervising VL in the initial stage of the research. The work of TF was supported by the Czech Funding Agency under the grant 20-26018S. The Associate Editor Anastasia Kiratzi gratefully acknowledges Prof Honn Kao and an anonymous reviewer for their substantial help in handling this manuscript and the concise reviews they provided.

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  1. Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Vojtěch Lávička & Tomáš Fischer

  2. Institute of Geophysics, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

    Vojtěch Lávička

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  1. Vojtěch Lávička
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  2. Tomáš Fischer
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Correspondence to Vojtěch Lávička.

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Lávička, V., Fischer, T. Rupturing of small natural earthquakes in West Bohemia investigated by source scanning. J Seismol 26, 57–78 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-021-10043-y

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