Investigating earthquake scaling relationships from a 15 year archive of InSAR-derived earthquake models

In the 15 years since the first InSAR study of the 1992 Landers earthquake, the first event to be studied using InSAR, over 50 events have been studied wholly or jointly using InSAR. This constitutes a rich archive of published studies that can be mined for information on earthquake phenomenology. Empirical earthquake scaling relationships, as can be inferred from estimates of fault dimensions, slip and moment for multiple earthquakes, are extensively used in seismic hazard forecasting, and also constitute a means of placing constraints on the bulk mechanical behaviour of the seismogenic upper crust. As a source of such data, studies that utilise information from InSAR have an advantage over seismic methods in that in many cases, a key parameter, the fault length, can be measured directly from the observations. In addition, in cases of good interferogram coherence, the high spatial density of surface deformation observations that InSAR affords can place tight constraints on fault width and other important parameters. We present here a preliminary survey of earthquake scaling relationships as supported by the existing archive of InSAR earthquake studies. We find that for events with Mw > 6, the data support moment scaling with the square of fault length, in keeping with the studies of Scholz and others, and imply proportionality between fault average slip and fault length. There are currently too few datapoints for great earthquakes (Mw > 8) to assess any proposed change in scaling for such events. Scatterplots of average slip versus fault length show two broad fields -- an area of high slip-to-length ratios (> 2 × 10-5) which are predominantly associated with faults with low long-term slip rates, predominantly from intraplate settings, and an area of lower slip-to-length ratios (< 2 × 10-5) which typically are larger events from faults with higher long-term slip rates (e.g. the North Anatolian and Kunlun faults, and the Peru-Chile subduction zone). In addition, we compare InSAR-derived 'geodetic' moment estimates with 'seismic' moment estimates from body wave studies and from the Global CMT catalogue; we find that any bias towards larger moments from InSAR studies is within the standard deviation of the difference between moment estimates from InSAR and seismology.