Seismicity in Bohai Bay: New Features Revealed by Matched Filter Technique

The Bohai Bay Basin (BBB) is a subsiding trough, which is located in northern China and bounded by outcropping Precambrian crystalline basement: to the north is the Yan Mountains, to the west the Taihang Mountains, to the southeast the Luxi Uplift, and to the east the Jiaodong Uplift and the Liaodong Uplift. It is not only cut through by famous right-lateral strike-slip fault, Tancheng-Lujiang Fault (TLF), but also rifled through by Zhangjiakou-Bohai Seismic Zone (ZBSZ). Its formation/evolution has close relation with continental dynamics, and is concerned greatly by Geoscientists. Although seismicity might shed light on this issue, there is no clear image of earthquake distribution in this region as result of difficulty in seismic observation of bay area. In this paper, we employ Matched Filter Technique (MFT) to better understand the local seismicity. MFT is originally used to detect duplicated events, thus is not capable to find new events with different locations. So we make some improvement on this method. Firstly, we adopt the idea proposed by David Shelly et al. (Nature, 2007) to conduct a strong detection and a weak detection simultaneously, which enable us to find more micro-events. Then, we relocate the detected events, which provides us with more accurate spatial distribution of new events as well as the geometry of related faults, comparing with traditional MFT. Results show that the sites of some famous historical strong events are obviously the locations concentrated with microearthquakes. Accordingly, we detect/determine/discuss the accurate positions of the historical strong events in BBB employing the results of the modified MFT. Moreover, the earthquakes in BBB form many seismic zones, of which the strikes mostly near the one of TLF although they together form the east end of ZBSZ. In the 2014 AGU fall meeting, we will introduce the details of our results and their geodynamical significance. Reference: Shelly, D. R., G. C. Beroza, and S. Ide, 2007, Non-volcanic tremor and low frequency earthquake swarms, Nature, 446, 305-307, doi:10.1038/nature05666