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1 Berkeley Seismological
Laboratory
215 McCone Hall, UC Berkeley
Berkeley, California
94720-4760
| Abstract |
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| Introduction |
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Non-DC events with significant volumetric components have been observed in various volcanic and geothermal areas such as The Geysers geothermal area, California; Aso Volcano, Japan; and Mt. Etna and Campi Flegrei, Italy (Ross et al., 1999; Legrand et al., 2000; Saraò et al., 2001; Guidarelli et al., 2002). These studies have shown that the percentage of events with isotropic components and the strength of the isotropic component can vary with location. These differences appear to be due to different underlying physical mechanisms. Four non-DC events have also been previously identified in the Long Valley caldera, California (Dreger et al., 2000). In this article, we consider the Long Valley caldera along with the Mono-Inyo craters and the seismically active Sierra Nevada block to be part of the Long Valley volcanic region located in eastern California within the Sierra Nevada frontal fault system (Fig. 1).
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Equivocal evidence for fluids has also been identified south of the caldera in the seismically active Sierra Nevada block. Three large events, the M 5.8 4 October 1978 Wheeler Crest earthquake along with two May 1980 events greater than M 6, were best described using a combination of DC and CLVD components (Julian and Sipkin, 1985). Unlike the 1978 event, the 1980 earthquakes were part of a larger earthquake swarm that extended up into the Long Valley caldera. The CLVD components were thought to be due to water or low-viscosity magma involvement in the source process. However, there has been much controversy surrounding this solution, since these events can also be modeled using a complex DC source involving multiple rupture planes (Wallace, 1985). Unfortunately, the exact source model cannot be resolved with the available data, and this controversy continues. Additionally, in August 1998, during a minor earthquake sequence without a clear mainshock, three microearthquakes displayed strikingly harmonic spectral signatures that were hypothesized to have been caused by a magmatic-fluid-controlled source process (Hough et al., 2000). Possible magma bodies have also been identified in the Sierra Nevada block from early S-wave shadowing studies (Ryall and Ryall, 1984). In contrast to the caldera and the Sierra Nevada block, the Mono-Inyo volcanic chain to the north has exhibited little seismicity even though the most recent volcanic eruption occurred in this region (Sieh, 1984).
In this study, we investigated the source mechanisms of events greater than M 3.5 occurring between 1993 and 2003 within a 100-km-wide circular area centered at the Long Valley caldera to identify events with significant coseismic volume changes. In this active geothermal and magmatic area, we treat coseismic volume changes as an indicator of fluid involvement at the source. Our results show that events with significant volumetric components in this magnitude range were fairly rare over the observation period. Of 33 high-quality events, 28 are best characterized by a simple DC source model, and only 5 have coseismic volume increases.
| Data and Methodology |
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For the DC and DC + isotropic models, a
grid-search method iterating over strike, dip, rake, DC moment, and
isotropic moment, which is equal to zero in the pure DC case, was
used to find the solution that best fit the observed three- component waveforms
bandpass filtered between 0.02 and 0.05 Hz. Since the grid-search method finely
searched over the entire model space, we feel confident that although the method
iterates over nonlinear equations, it does not suffer from local minima
complications such as those common in linearized approaches. For the deviatoric
and full moment tensor models, the second-rank symmetric seismic moment tensor
is solved by linearly inverting complete three- component filtered broadband
seismograms in the time domain using a weighted least-squares approach. The
percent isotropic for these models is determined by dividing the isotropic
moment, one-third the trace of the diagonalized moment tensor, by the total
moment. The deviation of the source from a DC is determined by
=
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min/
max|,
where
min and
max refer
to the smallest and largest eigenvalues in an absolute sense. The percent
DC and CLVD of the deviatoric portion of the moment tensor
is then (1 2
) x 100% and (2
)
x 100%, respectively. Green's functions for all four models were
computed utilizing a frequency-wavenumber integration method and the SoCal
velocity model
(Dreger and Helmberger, 1993) for
source depths every 3 km between 2 and 17 km. A set of seven Berkeley Digital
Seismic Network stations (BKS, CMB, KCC,
MHC, ORV, PKD, and SAO) providing
the best azimuthal coverage and data quality are used in this investigation. In
practice, however, a solution would usually have a subset of these stations
depending on station availability and data-quality issues.
The variance reduction is the goodness-of-fit parameter between the data and
synthetics and is computed using
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When testing more complex source models, the variance reduction usually
increases with increasing complexity. F-test statistics were performed
to determine if the additional CLVD and/or volumetric components
represented a true aspect of the source mechanism or if they simply added
nonphysical parameters to the inversion. To do this we computed the prediction
error, ei,
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2,
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| Results |
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The remaining five events all have statistically significant positive volumetric components. The two statistical tests that determine the significance of the volumetric components, F ratios 3 and 4, show that source models containing isotropic components fit the data significantly better than source models that do not. For these five events, we use F ratio 2 to determine if the CLVD component is also significant. This test shows that only one of the five, event 10, also has a statistically significant CLVD component. Tables 3 and 4 show the mechanisms for the DC + isotropic and full moment tensor events, respectively. The variance reduction values in Table 5 show how well each model fits the waveforms of the non-DC events. Table 6 gives the results of the F-tests for the five events with significant volumetric components. Assuming that both F ratios 3 and 4 determine that an event does not have a statistically significant isotropic component, F ratio 1 can determine if a deviatoric source model is preferred over a DC source model. However, none of the 33 events are best characterized by a deviatoric source model. At this point, it is important to remember that the applied statistics can only determine which of the four source models is most appropriate for each earthquake, but place no guarantee on the physical mechanism behind these non-DC events. All non-DC events are located either in the south moat of the caldera or in the Sierra Nevada block (Fig. 2). We were not able to analyze the source process of earthquakes in or near the vicinity of the Mono-Inyo volcanic chain or Mammoth Mountain because events greater than M 3.5 were not recorded during the time interval investigated by this study.
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The first event with a significant volumetric component, event 1, occurred on 11 August 1993 in the Sierra Nevada block during an intense earthquake swarm. The six-day Red Slate Mountain earthquake swarm started on 10 August and produced the largest earthquake and the greatest number of events associated with a single earthquake swarm in the Long Valley volcanic region in 1993. As seen in Table 6, F ratios 3 and 4 determine that this event has a statistically significant isotropic component at the 95% confidence level. F ratio 2 determines that adding the CLVD component to the inversion does not significantly improve the solution. Hence, the best source model for this event is the DC + isotropic model. The isotropic component of this event contributes 48% of the total moment release.
The next four events with coseismic volume increases (events 10, 11, 13, and 14) occurred in the south moat of the Long Valley caldera during a period of unrest at the peak of a large earthquake swarm that spanned July 1997 though January 1998. These events had been previously identified as having significant volumetric components by Dreger et al. (2000); however, the current study investigates a wider range of possible source mechanisms. Thus, the results presented here update the solutions of the previous investigation. We will first discuss event 10. Both F ratios 3 and 4 indicate that this event has a significant isotropic component. We then utilized F ratio 2, since it a priori assumes that the event in question has a significant isotropic component, to determine if the CLVD component is also significant. The results of this test indicate that the addition of the CLVD component significantly improves the fit to the data. As such, event 10 is best described using the full moment tensor model. The CLVD component of this event contributes a large 57% to the total moment release while the isotropic component contributes 42%. Interestingly, the DC component is only 1% of the total moment, suggesting that shear along a fault plane was not an important part of the earthquake process and implying that the mechanism for this event resembled an opening tensile fault.
For event 11, both F ratios 3 and 4 indicate that this earthquake has a significant isotropic component at the 99% confidence level. The results of F ratio 2 indicate that the CLVD component is statistically insignificant. Hence, this event is best described using the DC + isotropic model. This solution revealed that the isotropic component produced 35% of the total moment release for this event. As an example of how the different sources can influence the waveforms, Figure 3 compares the filtered data observed at station SAO with synthetic waveforms computed using the four different source models. In this example, the most notable differences can be seen in the radial component. Figure 4 compares the observed data at all stations for event 11 with the DC + isotropic source synthetic waveforms.
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For event 13, F tests 3 and 4 also indicate that this event has a significant isotropic component while F ratio 2 determines that this event has a statistically insignificant CLVD component. Thus, this event is also best modeled using the DC + isotropic solution. The results of this inversion indicate that the isotropic component of this event contributes 27% of the total moment release.
For the remaining event, event 14, F tests 3 and 4 again indicate that it has a significant isotropic component. As seen in Table 6, F ratio 2 indicates that this event does not have a significant CLVD component. As such, this event is best modeled using the DC + isotropic source model. The isotropic component of event 14 contributes 35% of the total moment.
Pure DC events sometimes occurred close in space and time to events with significant non-DC components (Fig. 2). For example, DC event 12 occurred 10 minutes before non- DC event 13 and was located just a few kilometers away from all four south-moat non-DC events. In some cases, DC events determined by this study were located near previously identified fluid-influenced microseismicity structures. For example, events 15 and 16 occurred close in space to a microseismicity trend inferred to be a compensated tensile failure plane (Foulger et al., 2004). Thus, it appears that the factors necessary to produce isotropic components only coalesce and trigger non-DC events within a relatively small physical and temporal window in the Long Valley volcanic region.
| Stability of Focal Mechanism Solutions |
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ílen
et al., 1996;
Panza and Saraò, 2000).
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| Stability of the Isotropic Component |
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ílen
et al., 1996;
Panza and Saraò, 2000). The studies using synthetic data have shown that the isotropic component can be
correctly recovered even with poor station configurations when as few as three
three- component local stations are used. These synthetic tests have also shown
that errors in the hypocenter and velocity model are small compared to errors
due to high noise levels. In this study, we conducted a detailed investigation of 33 events with low noise levels. With respect to the velocity model, at the passband used in this study, the SoCal model has been shown to not produce statistically significant isotropic components due to unmodeled near-source velocity structure in the Long Valley caldera (Panning et al., 2001). To determine the stability of the isotropic component with station configuration for data recorded at regional distances, we first performed jackknife tests on the four events with significant isotropic components that had four or more stations in their solution to determine the likelihood of non-DC events incorrectly being identified as DC events. Thus, for each event, for all station combinations of three or more, we determined the statistical significance of the volumetric component. For the event with the significant CLVD component, event 10, we compared the deviatoric and full moment tensor solutions. For events without significant CLVD components, we compared the DC and DC + isotropic solutions. Statistically significant isotropic components were determined if the improvement in fit to the data was at or above the 95% significance level as determined by using the F-test statistic. Unfortunately, event 1 had only three stations with good- quality data and thus jackknife tests were not performed on this event. For events 10 and 13, there were 5 four-station solutions and 10 three-station solutions. For events 11 and 14, there were 6 five-station solutions, 15 four-station solutions, and 20 three-station solutions.
All 52 combinations of four or more stations recovered the statistically significant isotropic component. For solutions with three stations, 6 iterations out of 60 failed to recover the isotropic component. It is reasonable to assume that significant isotropic components can be recovered with as few as three, but preferably with at least four, stations in the solution.
We also investigated the possibility of obtaining a spurious isotropic component due to poor data coverage. For this test, we took three high-quality DC solutions (events 15, 18, and 21) and performed jackknife tests to see if any combination of three or more stations would result in a statistically significant isotropic component at or above the 95% significance level. For this test we compared the DC and DC + isotropic solutions for all three events. For their best solutions, events 15 and 18 originally had six stations in their solutions, while event 21 had seven stations.
Of 75 three-station solutions, 1 returned a false positive. Of 65 four-station solutions, 3 incorrectly determined that the event had a significant isotropic component. Five- and six-station solutions did not return false positives. Thus, we feel confident that the isotropic components of our non-DC events with at least five stations in their inversion are not due to poor data coverage. This test, however, casts a small amount of doubt as to the validity of non-DC event 1 which has only three stations in its solution.
| Discussion |
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Of the events that occurred within the caldera, events 11, 13, and 14 are best characterized using a DC + isotropic model, while event 10 is best described using a full moment tensor model that solves for DC, CLVD, and isotropic components. The isotropic components of all four events indicate that there was a coseismic volume increase in the source region. These events occurred during a period of unrest that also affected the geothermal system. Water-level changes at wells within the caldera were attributed to upward migration of hydrothermal fluids (Roeloffs et al., 2003). An examination of relocated seismicity on the day that the four non- DC events occurred revealed a cloud of seismicity that began to migrate at approximately the same time as the first non- DC event occurred (Prejean, 2002). This cloud of seismicity started at approximately 9 km depth and fanned out upward and westward over an approximately 1-km-wide near- vertical fault zone traveling at about 0.05 m/sec for 23 hours to achieve depths as shallow as 4.5 km. This migration is most probably indicative of fluid circulation, which when combined with pre-existing tectonic stresses could have initiated the events with significant isotropic components. In light of the fact that the Long Valley caldera has a known active geothermal system, it is not unexpected to find events with large isotropic components in this area.
Sierra Nevada block event 1 also has a significant non- DC component; however, our solution stability analysis indicated that events with only three stations in their solution have a small chance of producing spurious isotropic components. This study determined that event 1 is best characterized by a DC + isotropic model whose sign indicated a coseismic volume increase in the source region. Since the strike-slip faults in the Sierra Nevada block do not appear to intersect the ring fracture system of the Long Valley caldera (Prejean et al., 2002), we speculate that the source of the fluids influencing event 1 were not geothermal fluids originating from within the caldera that migrated into the Sierra Nevada block via these conduits. Although there has been equivocal evidence of magma or magmatic fluids present in this area from S-wave shadowing studies (Ryall and Ryall, 1984) and from the analysis of three microearthquakes observed during an August 1998 earthquake sequence (Hough et al., 2000), the locations of these potential sources of fluids were not near event 1. The most likely potential fluid source would be fluids associated with the local hydrothermal system. Previously, the only non-DC events to occur in this area were a 1978 M 5.8 event and two M 6 1980 events (Julian and Sipkin, 1985). Event 1, however, did not occur along the same fault planes as these earlier events (Prejean et al., 2002). Additionally, the full six-component moment tensor solution cannot be computed for the three earlier events with the available data, and thus it is not known if the non-DC components were due to fluid involvement or complex shear faulting. In this study, we specifically solved for the full moment tensor and hence can conclusively rule out complex coseismic shear faulting as a possible mechanism for the five events with significant isotropic components.
The increase of broadband seismometers in geothermal and volcanic areas has
facilitated the worldwide exploration for non-DC earthquake source
mechanisms. These studies have shown that the percentage of events with
isotropic components and the strength of the isotropic component can vary with
location. At Aso Volcano, Japan, inversions of near- field broadband signals of
long-period tremors and phreatic eruptions have shown primarily isotropic
mechanisms, greater than 95% of the total moment released, for dozens of events
over a 1-year period
(Legrand et al., 2000).
Other volcanoes, such as Mt. Etna, produced only 2 microearthquakes out of 28
events with M
2.0 with significant volumetric components over a
16-month period preceding the 19911993 eruption
(Saraò et al., 2001). These volumetric components were between 17% and 47% of the total
moment released for each event. A study of 18 microearthquakes occurring during
a period of intense seismicity in 1984 at Campi Flegrei showed that less than
half of these events had large volumetric components up to 93% of the total
moment release
(Guidarelli et al., 2002).
These differences are most probably due to different underlying physical
mechanisms. The Long Valley volcanic area is more similar to the Mt. Etna region
in terms of the scarcity and strength of the isotropic components. In this
study, out of 33 events investigated, only 5 have significant non-DC
mechanisms whose isotropic components are between 27% and 48% of
the total moment released for each event.
A previous full moment tensor study using a dense temporary seismic network operating during the summer of 1997 showed that most of 26 microearthquakes less than M 3.1 were characterized by positive CLVD and isotropic components (Foulger et al., 2004). These events, all between 0 and 6 km, were located in the south moat of the caldera, near the southwestern rim of the resurgent dome and under Mammoth Mountain. Foulger et al. (2004) determined that the solutions for these microearthquakes were consistent with a combined shear and tensile faulting model with rapid fluid flow into the opening crack. The small magnitude of these events suggests that the fluid involved was probably not magmatic but rather water, steam, or CO2. Interestingly, five events in that study were equivocally characterized by small volume decreases, indicating a closing of cracks or voids. The difference in the total number of isotropic events in the two magnitude ranges studied in the Long Valley caldera suggests that conditions are scale dependent, possibly in terms of the ability of individual high-pressure reservoirs to sustain pressurization during the faulting process as the crack or fault grows larger. It is interesting to note that events larger than M 3.5 did not occur near the southwestern rim of the resurgent dome or under Mammoth Mountain. Unfortunately, this meant that events in these areas could not be investigated using our method.
The worldwide diversity apparent in the strength and production of isotropic components should be closely studied, ultimately to determine if there is a predictive relationship between these events and changes to the geothermal or magmatic system. To achieve this goal, future studies should strive to combine nonseismic as well as seismic data when determining the source kinematics, the properties of the fluid involved, and the feasibility and physics behind the different possible physical mechanisms.
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| Acknowledgments |
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Manuscript received October 21, 2004
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