Seismicity at Uturuncu Volcano, Bolivia: Volcano-Tectonic Earthquake Swarms Triggered by the 2010 Maule, Chile Earthquake and Non-Triggered Background Activity

We find that the 270 ky dormant Uturuncu Volcano in SW Bolivia exhibits relatively high rates of shallow, volcano-tectonic seismicity that is dominated by swarm-like activity. We also document that the 27 February 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule, Chile earthquake triggered an exceptionally high rate of seismicity in the seconds to days following the main event. Although dormant, Uturuncu is currently being studied due to its large-scale deformation rate of 1-2 cm/yr uplift as revealed by InSAR. As part of the NASA-funded Andivolc project to investigate seismicity of volcanoes in the central Andes, a seismic network of 15 stations (9 Mark Products L22 short period and 6 Guralp CMG40T intermediate period sensors) with an average spacing of about 10 km was installed at Uturuncu from April 2009 to April 2010. Volcano-tectonic earthquakes occur at an average rate of about 3-4 per day, and swarms of 5-60 events within a span of minutes to hours occur a few times per month. Most of these earthquakes are located close to the summit at depths near and above sea level. The largest swarm occurred on 28 September 2009 and consisted of 60 locatable events over a time span of 28 hours. The locations of volcano-tectonic earthquakes at Uturuncu are oriented in a NW-SE trend, which matches the dominant orientation of regional faults and suggests a relationship between the fault system at Uturuncu and the regional tectonics of the area; a NW-SE trending fault beneath Uturuncu may serve to localize stresses that are accumulating over the broad area of uplift. Based on automated locations, the maximum local magnitude of these events is approximately M = 4 and the average magnitude is approximately M = 2. An initial estimate of the b-value is about b = 1.2. The Mw 8.8 Maule earthquake on 27 February 2010 triggered hundreds of local volcano-tectonic events at Uturuncu. High-pass filtering of the long period surface waves reveals that the first triggered events occurred with the onset of the Rayleigh (R1) and Love (G1) waves. Activity gradually declined following the passage of the R1 and G1 waves, however rates of triggered events increased again with the passage of the R2/R3 and G2/G3 surface waves. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such triggering has been observed for multiple surface wave trains from the same large earthquake. All the observations together suggest metastable conditions in the shallow summit region of Uturuncu volcano.