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A 667-year record of co-seismic and interseismic Coulomb stress changes in central Italy reveals the role of fault interaction in controlling irregular earthquake recurrence intervals

Wedmore, L.N.J.; Faure Walker, J.P.; Roberts, G.P.; Sammonds, P.R.; McCaffrey, K.J.W.; Cowie, P.A.

A 667-year record of co-seismic and interseismic Coulomb stress changes in central Italy reveals the role of fault interaction in controlling irregular earthquake recurrence intervals Thumbnail


Authors

L.N.J. Wedmore

J.P. Faure Walker

G.P. Roberts

P.R. Sammonds

P.A. Cowie



Abstract

Current studies of fault interaction lack sufficiently long earthquake records and measurements of fault slip rates over multiple seismic cycles to fully investigate the effects of interseismic loading and coseismic stress changes on the surrounding fault network. We model elastic interactions between 97 faults from 30 earthquakes since 1349 A.D. in central Italy to investigate the relative importance of co-seismic stress changes versus interseismic stress accumulation for earthquake occurrence and fault interaction. This region has an exceptionally long, 667 year record of historical earthquakes and detailed constraints on the locations and slip rates of its active normal faults. Of 21 earthquakes since 1654, 20 events occurred on faults where combined coseismic and interseismic loading stresses were positive even though ~20% of all faults are in “stress shadows” at any one time. Furthermore, the Coulomb stress on the faults that experience earthquakes is statistically different from a random sequence of earthquakes in the region. We show how coseismic Coulomb stress changes can alter earthquake interevent times by ~103 years, and fault length controls the intensity of this effect. Static Coulomb stress changes cause greater interevent perturbations on shorter faults in areas characterized by lower strain (or slip) rates. The exceptional duration and number of earthquakes we model enable us to demonstrate the importance of combining long earthquake records with detailed knowledge of fault geometries, slip rates, and kinematics to understand the impact of stress changes in complex networks of active faults.

Citation

Wedmore, L., Faure Walker, J., Roberts, G., Sammonds, P., McCaffrey, K., & Cowie, P. (2017). A 667-year record of co-seismic and interseismic Coulomb stress changes in central Italy reveals the role of fault interaction in controlling irregular earthquake recurrence intervals. Journal of Geophysical Research. Solid Earth, 122(7), 5691-5711. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017jb014054

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 12, 2017
Online Publication Date Jul 18, 2017
Publication Date Jul 18, 2017
Deposit Date Jun 14, 2017
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Journal of Geophysical Research. Solid Earth
Print ISSN 2169-9313
Electronic ISSN 2169-9356
Publisher American Geophysical Union
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 122
Issue 7
Pages 5691-5711
DOI https://doi.org/10.1002/2017jb014054

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Published Journal Article (Advance online version) (4.9 Mb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version © 2017. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.





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