Testing for Changes in Crustal Velocity at the Tocopilla Earthquake, Northern Chile

We use two different techniques to investigate the region between Antofagasta and Arica in northern Chile for crustal velocity changes. Data are taken from the 19 broadband stations of the IPOC project (Integrated Plate Boundary Observatory Chile) operating partly since 2006 by GFZ and Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP). In the neighborhood of the seismic stations an M7.0 earthquake occurred near Tocopilla on 14 November 2007. Other studies have shown that in the course of such earthquakes seismic velocities may be changing (e.g. Brenguier et al. 2008). The first method is testing for phase shifts in receiver functions. To avoid varying travel paths of different events we compare events located in small source regions. Although temporal variations have been found in receiver functions for the Parkfield M6.0 and San Simeon M6.5 earthquakes (Audet 2006) we cannot find any variations exceeding the noise level of our dataset at the time of the M7.0 earthquake near Tocopilla. Therefore the data is analyzed with the help of cross-correlation technique of ambient seismic noise (Bensen et al. 2007). Compared to the first method it has the advantage of regularly available correlation functions (e.g. 1 per day). We report on first results.