Thrust-faulting earthquake induced many normal-faulting aftershocks, in northeastern Chiba Prefecture, Japan

A thrust faulting type earthquake of a local body wave magnitude (MJMA) of 4.9 occurred near the upper interface of the subducting Philippine Sea Plate (PHS) in northeastern Chiba Prefecture on July 22, 2010. We have been developing a dense seismic net work call the MeSO-net in the Tokyo Metropolitan area. So far, 249 stations are available for the study of a large felt earthquakes and small event as low as M=1.5. We also deployed a temporary seismic array 24 of which were used for the analysis of the aftershocks. We locate the July 22 earthquake(MJMA=4.9) and its 19 aftershocks (M>1.5) by the double difference location algorithm. We also determine focal mechanisms for the main- and after-shocks. The locations of the main shock and three aftershocks are closely distributed near the upper interface of PHS, which is consistent with the idea that the event occurred on the plate interface. However, most aftershocks whose focal mechanism is normal-fault type with a T-axis directing NE-SW are located off the upper interface indicating that intra-slab events are also generated by the event. Acknowledgement: The present study is supported by Special Project for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation in Tokyo Metropolitan Area from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan.