Comparative Study Of Focal Mechanisms In South Central Chile Before And After The 2010 Maule Earthquake

On 27 February 2010, a Mw=8.8 earthquake occurred off the coast of south central Chile rupturing nearly 500 km of the subduction zone plate interface. The earthquake also generated a tsunami and caused more than 500 fatalities. The largest earthquakes recorded have taken place along subduction margins (e.g. Chile 1960, 2010, Andaman-Sumatra 2004, Japan 2011) and understanding their rupture mechanisms and deformation regimes is therefore of vital importance. From November 2004 to October 2005, the TIPTEQ project ("From The Incoming Plate to megaThrust EarthQuake"; Rietbrock et al., 2007; Haberland et al., 2009) maintained a network of 120 seismic stations inland and 10 stations at sea between 37 and 39° lat. S., continuously-recording and monitoring the seismicity occurring in the area before the 2010 Maule earthquake. By using first motion polarities and moment tensor inversion we have computed and analyzed focal mechanisms for a subset of data from these records. We found thrust faulting along the subduction interface down to a depth of ~30 km, followed by a gap in the seismicity and then deeper earthquakes showing diverse faulting mechanisms more sparsely distributed within the subducting plate. We also see strike-slip crustal faulting occurring down to ~12 km depth within the area of the Lanalhue fault. The most striking observation is the presence of deep (40 km) normal faulting seismicity in the fore-arc, close to the trench. We have now started to analyze the International Maule Aftershocks Dataset (IMAD) of the 2010 earthquake in the southern rupture region. Again we observe thrust faulting in the subduction interface and a seismic gap between an upper and lower zone of seismicity along the interface. By comparison of the pre- and post-earthquake datasets we are investigating whether the Maule earthquake caused any changes in the style of deformation in this part of Chile. References Haberland, C., A. Rietbrock, D. Lange, K. Bataille, and T. Dahm (2009). Structure of the seismogenic zone of the southcentral Chilean margin revealed by local earthquake traveltime tomography, J. Geophys. Res., 114, B01317, doi:10.1029/2008JB005802. Rietbrock, A., C. Haberland, D. Lange, T. Dahm, A. Lodge, K. Bataille, F. Tilmann, E. Flueh, and TIPTEQ Research Group (2007). Studying the seismogenic coupling zone with a passive seismic array: The TIPTEQ experiment in Southern Chile, Geophys. Res. Abstracts, 9, 06466.