Different earthquake nucleation conditions revealed by stress drop and b-value mapping in the northern Chilean subduction zone.

ABSTRACT: Stress drop is an earthquake property indicative for the characteristic relation of slip to fault dimension. It is furthermore affected by fault strength, fault topography, the presence of fluids, rupture size, slip, and velocity. In this article, the stress drop image of an entire subduction zone, namely for the seismically highly active northernmost part of Chile, is combined with mapped b-values and their corresponding magnitude distribution in order to better constrain the conditions under which earthquakes of different provenances may nucleate. The underlying recent earthquake catalog contains over 180,000 events, covering 15 years of seismicity, from which more than 50,000 stress drop estimates were computed. Their spatial average segments the subduction zone into different parts, i.

SUBMITTER: Folesky J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11133448 | biostudies-literature | 2024 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature