Fingerprinting slow earthquakes
Thursday, April 23, 2009 - 13:42
in Earth & Climate
The most powerful earthquakes happen at the junction of two converging tectonic plates, where one plate is sliding (or subducting) beneath the other. Now a team of researchers, led by Teh-Ru Alex Song of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, has found that an anomalous layer at the top of a subducting plate coincides with the locations of slow earthquakes and non-volcanic tremors. The presence of such a layer in similar settings elsewhere could point to other regions of slow quakes. Slow earthquakes, also called silent earthquakes, take days, weeks, or even months to release pent-up energy instead of seconds or minutes as in normal earthquakes. The research is published in the April 24th issue of Science.