TY - JOUR
T1 - The 2 March 2016 Wharton Basin Mw 7.8 earthquake
T2 - High stress drop north-south strike-slip rupture in the diffuse oceanic deformation zone between the Indian and Australian Plates
AU - Lay, Thorne
AU - Ye, Lingling
AU - Ammon, Charles J.
AU - Dunham, Audrey
AU - Koper, Keith D.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work made use of GMT and SAC software. We thank M. Cleveland for his help with and use of his relocation software for the aftershock analysis. Gavin Hayes and an anonymous reviewer provided constructive comments on the manuscript. The IRIS DMS data center was used to access the seismic data from Global seismic network and Federation of Digital Seismic Network stations. This work was supported by NSF grant EAR0635570 (T.L.).
Publisher Copyright:
©2016. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2016/8/16
Y1 - 2016/8/16
N2 - The diffuse deformation zone between the Indian and Australian plates has hosted numerous major and great earthquakes during the seismological record, including the 11 April 2012 Mw 8.6 event, the largest recorded intraplate earthquake. On 2 March 2016, an Mw 7.8 strike-slip faulting earthquake occurred in the northwestern Wharton Basin, in a region bracketed by north-south trending fracture zones with no previously recorded large event nearby. Despite the large magnitude, only minor source finiteness is evident in aftershock locations or resolvable from seismic wave processing including high-frequency P wave backprojections and Love wave directivity analysis. Our analyses indicate that the event ruptured bilaterally on a north-south trending fault over a length of up to 70 km, with rupture speed of ≤ 2 km/s, and a total duration of ~35 s. The estimated stress drop, ~20 MPa, is high, comparable to estimates for other large events in this broad intraplate oceanic deformation zone.
AB - The diffuse deformation zone between the Indian and Australian plates has hosted numerous major and great earthquakes during the seismological record, including the 11 April 2012 Mw 8.6 event, the largest recorded intraplate earthquake. On 2 March 2016, an Mw 7.8 strike-slip faulting earthquake occurred in the northwestern Wharton Basin, in a region bracketed by north-south trending fracture zones with no previously recorded large event nearby. Despite the large magnitude, only minor source finiteness is evident in aftershock locations or resolvable from seismic wave processing including high-frequency P wave backprojections and Love wave directivity analysis. Our analyses indicate that the event ruptured bilaterally on a north-south trending fault over a length of up to 70 km, with rupture speed of ≤ 2 km/s, and a total duration of ~35 s. The estimated stress drop, ~20 MPa, is high, comparable to estimates for other large events in this broad intraplate oceanic deformation zone.
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U2 - 10.1002/2016GL069931
DO - 10.1002/2016GL069931
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84982947875
SN - 0094-8276
VL - 43
SP - 7937
EP - 7945
JO - Geophysical Research Letters
JF - Geophysical Research Letters
IS - 15
ER -