What many years of tremor reveals about the Mexican Sweet Spot

Different temporary seismic deployments have detected and located tectonic tremor in Mexico. These different temporary studies have lasted for a maximum of a few years. However, the long-term SSE's occur every 4 years. The permanent network is too sparse to locate SSEs, however one station is located in the main tremor region and has very low noise. We use spectral detection to create a catalog from its installation in March 2009 to the present. The catalog corresponds with the catalog determined during the temporary GGAP seismic network deployment, which gives us confidence that the single station detection works. Two separate large long term SSEs (2009-2010 and 2014) occur in this time span. We find a good correlation between the tremor and slip at the beginning of the SSEs. However, we find differences in both in the later stages of the SSEs. The 2009-2010 SSE appeared to be ending towards the end of 2009, however it was reactivated by the Feb. 27, 2010 M8.8 Chilean earthquake. The tremor showed a small many day burst (similar to other bursts) associated with the earthquake, but did not resume the high continuous tremor rate associated with the beginning of the SSE or seen during other large SSEs. The tremor rate at the end of the 2014 SSE stayed high for many months after the SSE and did not return to the background inter-SSE rate until the middle of 2015, about 6 months after the SSE ended. The background tremor rate is roughly 1 hour/day and remains constant over the entire period. This rate is actually comprised of many bursts that can last for up to 2 weeks with up to 80 hours of tremor during that time. The very constant long-term tremor rate made up of bursts can be explained by a simple stick-slip model.