Non-Volcanic Tremors beneath the Southern Central Range in Taiwan

Deep non-volcanic tremors (NVT) triggered by teleseismic surface waves have been systematically observed in the Central Range in Taiwan recently. The discovery of NVT in Taiwan, as an arc-continental type collision environment, would provide us better understanding of critical conditions related to tremor occurrence and of the fault mechanics at the bottom of the seismogenic layer. Aiming to capture more NVT events, we have further installed two dense 36-element, small-aperture seismic arrays in the Liouguei and Lidao areas. Two arrays are respectively located about 20 km in southwest and northeast to the tremor sources reported at the southern Central Range of Taiwan. In each array, the short-period, vertical-channel GS-11D sensors with 4.5Hz natural frequency were laid out on the relatively flat parts of the mountain areas in a grid of approximately 100 by 80 meters. We had successfully recorded nine sets of continuous seismic data for totally 4034 hours among the first half year of 2011. Among those data, as we expected, the two arrays recorded clear tremors triggered by the great Tohoku earthquake (Mw=8.9) on 2011/03/11. Based on the beamforming results of the western and eastern arrays, the possible tremor sources come from N60E and just beneath it, respectively. Therefore, we believe the possible source of triggered tremors were nearby the Lidao area. Since the array analysis is able to significantly increase the level of tremor detection, we are examining other possible NVT events during the deployed period and the possible conditions related to NVT events, such as the passing seismic waves from other large regional earthquakes.