Professor Thomas Herring
Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Earth Resources Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Title: Geodetic Analysis of Cascadia Slow Slip Events
Abstract: The largest and most destructive earthquakes occur at convergent plate margins where one tectonic plate (usually oceanic) is subducted under another (usually continental) tectonic plate. The strain building up in the tectonic plates due to the subduction zone interface being locked together can be seen in geodetic (GPS/GNSS) measurements of motion between monuments on the Earth’s surface. This strain is mainly released as large earthquakes, but in the last twenty years, very accurate GPS measurements have shown that some of the accumulated strain is released in “slow slip” events that look like earthquakes but can take days to months to happen. This strain release has implications for possibly triggering or delaying large earthquakes depending on what precisely happens during these events. In this seminar, we look at the analysis of geodetic GPS data in the Cascadia subduction in the Pacific Northwest. Our aim is to develop methodologies that allow the extraction of fine-scale detail about these events from noisy and incomplete GPS time series with analysis of openly available GPS data tailored to look at results in Cascadia. We develop methods for extracting source signals from the GPS data and model those results with slip and possible tensile motions on the subduction zone interface with the ultimate aim of understanding the strain accumulation and slow-release processes in these regions.
Zoom Link, Passcode: 293785
