Focal Mechanisms of Earthquakes in the Taiwan Strait
Abstract
The Taiwan Strait is situated on the continental shelf off the coast of southeast China between the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and from a tectonic perspective, it sits between the arc-continent collision zone of Taiwan in the east and the stable Eurasian continent in the west. Although the vast majority of seismic moment release occurs at the plate boundaries, there are seismic activities relatively far removed from the plate boundaries in the Taiwan Strait. Geophysical explorations have been very limited in the Taiwan Strait, and the crustal structure and the earthquakes in the strait have been poorly understood. Since 1991, there have been more than one hundred natural earthquakes of magnitude 3 and above in the strait. Because they are located outside of the seismic networks in the region, focal mechanisms of most of the earthquakes in the strait are still unknown. Our goal is to determine the focal mechanisms of the small to moderate earthquakes in the Taiwan Strait by collecting all available records from both sides of the Taiwan Strait. We invert the waveforms for the point-source moment tensors using Green functions computed from one-dimensional path-specific velocity models extracted from a regional three-dimensional model. The resulting focal mechanisms will be useful in our understanding of the characteristics of the crustal deformation and regional tectonics.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2009
- Bibcode:
- 2009AGUFM.T33B1907C
- Keywords:
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- 7215 SEISMOLOGY / Earthquake source observations