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JDR Vol.15 No.5 pp. 645-654
(2020)
doi: 10.20965/jdr.2020.p0645

Paper:

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Repeating Earthquakes Along the Colombian Subduction Zone

Juan Carlos Bermúdez-Barrios† and Hiroyuki Kumagai

Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University
Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Aichi 464-8601, Japan

†Corresponding author

Received:
February 28, 2020
Accepted:
June 1, 2020
Published:
August 1, 2020
Creative Commons License
Keywords:
repeating earthquakes, waveform correlation, subduction, interplate coupling
Abstract

Colombia is tectonically active, and several large earthquakes have ruptured the Colombia-Ecuador subduction zone (CESZ) during the last century. Among them, the Colombia-Ecuador earthquake in 1906 (Mw 8.4) and the Tumaco earthquake in 1979 (Mw 8.3) generated destructive tsunamis. Therefore, it is important to characterize the seismic rupture processes and their relation with interplate coupling along the CESZ. We searched for repeating earthquakes by performing waveform similarity analysis. Cross correlation (CC) values were computed between earthquake pairs with hypocenter differences of less than 50 km that were located in the northern CESZ (1°–4°N) and that occurred from June 1993 to February 2018. We used broadband and short-period seismic waveform data from the Servicio Geológico Colombiano (SGC) seismic network. A CC threshold value of 0.90 was used to identify the waveform similarity and select repeating earthquakes. We found repeating earthquakes distributed near the trench and the coast. Our estimated repeating earthquakes near the trench suggest that the interplate coupling in this region is low. This is in clear constrast to the occurrence of a large slip in the 1906 Colombia-Ecuador earthquake along the trench in the southern part of the CESZ, and suggests that rupture modes are different between the northern and southern parts of CESZ near the trench.

Cite this article as:
J. Bermúdez-Barrios and H. Kumagai, “Repeating Earthquakes Along the Colombian Subduction Zone,” J. Disaster Res., Vol.15 No.5, pp. 645-654, 2020.
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Last updated on Apr. 19, 2024