Gravitational body forces focus North American intraplate earthquakes

Will Levandowski (), Mark Zellman and Rich Briggs
Additional contact information
Will Levandowski: United States Geological Survey, Geologic Hazards Science Center
Mark Zellman: Fugro Consultants Inc.
Rich Briggs: United States Geological Survey, Geologic Hazards Science Center

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Earthquakes far from tectonic plate boundaries generally exploit ancient faults, but not all intraplate faults are equally active. The North American Great Plains exemplify such intraplate earthquake localization, with both natural and induced seismicity generally clustered in discrete zones. Here we use seismic velocity, gravity and topography to generate a 3D lithospheric density model of the region; subsequent finite-element modelling shows that seismicity focuses in regions of high-gravity-derived deviatoric stress. Furthermore, predicted principal stress directions generally align with those observed independently in earthquake moment tensors and borehole breakouts. Body forces therefore appear to control the state of stress and thus the location and style of intraplate earthquakes in the central United States with no influence from mantle convection or crustal weakness necessary. These results show that mapping where gravitational body forces encourage seismicity is crucial to understanding and appraising intraplate seismic hazard.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14314 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:8:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms14314

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14314

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().