Scientists for the first time have detected a slow slip earthquake in motion during the act of releasing tectonic pressure on a major fault zone at the bottom of the ocean.
Scientists for the first time have detected a slow slip earthquake in motion during the act of releasing tectonic pressure on a major fault zone at the bottom of the ocean.
The slow earthquake was recorded spreading along the tsunami-generating portion of the fault off the coast of Japan, behaving like a tectonic shock absorber. Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin described the event as the slow unzipping of the fault line between two of the Earth’s tectonic plates.
Their results were published in Science.
“It’s like a ripple moving across the plate interface,” said Josh Edgington, who conducted the work as a doctoral student at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences. Slow slip earthquakes are a type of slow-motion seismic event that take days or weeks to unfold. They are relatively new to science and are thought to be an important process for accumulating and releasing stress as part of the earthquake cycle. The new measurements, made along Japan’s Nankai Fault, appear to confirm that.
Read more at University of Texas at Austin
Image: Sensors and observation instruments being lowered into a borehole off the coast of Japan nearly 1,500 feet below the seafloor during an International Ocean Discovery Program mission in 2016. Sensors like these transmit data in real time to researchers in Japan and at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, and enabled researchers to detect and describe a slow slip earthquake in motion in a new study in Science. (Credit: Photo courtesy of Dick Peterse - ScienceMedia.nl)
