Source Rupture Process of the Solomon Islands Earthquake of April 1, 2007 Inferred from Teleseismic Body Waves

A large earthquake (Mw 8.1) followed by a tsunami took place in the southeast Pacific along the New Britain subduction zone on April 1, 2007. This region displays a complex tectonic nature where 4 plates intersect. Along the Solomon Island convergent margin the relatively small Woodlark and Solomon plates enter into the subduction zone side-by-side with the much larger Australia plate and the boundaries of these three plates are defined by transform faults. On a regional scale this subduction zone plate boundary is characterized by the occurrence of large earthquake doublets in 1971, 1974, 1975, 1977 and 2000. We investigated the source process of the April 1, 2007 earthquake using three different faulting patterns; (1) fixed thrust mechanism over the entire extend of the fault, (2) varying slip directions over the area of rupture and (3) varying focal mechanisms along the faulted region. The teleseismic body wave inversion technique that we used in our analysis of the source parameters for the three different fault models consistently yield a relatively large fault area (approximately 300 km by 50 km) with an overall seismic moment on the order of 1.0 x 1028 Nm. For the fixed mechanism and varying slip direction models, a major part of the seismic moment is released in the form of two pulses separated by 15-20 seconds. The second pulse is the largest one and it is located northwest of the hypocenter, implying a northwestward directed unilateral rupture. Our results indicate that the location of this maximum seismic moment release is close to the centroid location determined by Global CMT and also spatially coincides with the projected subduction of the transform boundary between the Australian and the Woodlark plates. The distribution of the dislocations computed for the varying slip direction model along the megathrust is characterized by three isolated patches of varying slip amounts and directions. One of these patches is located at the hypocenter of the event and the other two spatially coincides with boundaries of the three subducting plates. These transform boundaries display bathymetric highs (ridges) all along their trend which might have acted as asperities in the coupling zone of the plate interface and serve as the locations of major seismic moment release and slip during the rupture. The inversions for the varying mechanism model indicate some component of seismic energy was released with a strike-slip mechanism near the intersection of the transform boundary.