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The reproducing earthquakes of the Galapagos Islands

CIRES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER, COLORADO 80302
LAMONT-DOHERTY GEOLOGICAL OBSERVATORY OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, PALISADES, NEW YORK 10964

Abstract

The largest swarm of earthquakes of the last few decades accompanied the collapse of the Fernandina caldera in the Galapagos Islands in June of 1968. Many of the events were relatively large. (The largest 21 had moments ranging from 6 x 10²⁴ to 12 x 10²⁴ dyne-cm.) They produced teleseismic WWSSN records that were spectacularly consistent from event to event. The entire wave trains of the signals were nearly identical on any given component at any given station. This indicates that the mode of strain release in the region was unusually stable and coherent.

The body waveforms of the events have been modeled with synthetic seismograms. The best fault plane solution was found to be: strike = 335°, dip = 47°, and rake = 247°. The depths of all the larger shocks were close to 14 km. Previous work had suggested that the seismic energy was radiated by the collapsing caldera block at a depth of about 1 km. The new results indicate that large scale extensional faulting at depth was an important part of the multifaceted event during which the caldera collapsed.

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