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Abstract Large earthquakes rupture faults over hundreds of kilometers within minutes. Finite‐fault models image these processes and provide observational constraints for understanding earthquake physics. However, finite‐fault inversions are subject to non‐uniqueness and uncertainties. The diverse range of published models for the well‐recorded 2011 9.0 Tohoku‐Oki earthquake illustrates this challenge, and its rupture process remains under debate. Here, we comprehensively compare 32 published finite‐fault models of the Tohoku‐Oki earthquake. We aim to identify the most coherent slip features of the Tohoku‐Oki earthquake from these slip models and develop a new method for quantitatively analyzing their variations. We find that the models correlate poorly at 1‐km subfault size, irrespective of the data type. In contrast, model agreement improves significantly with increasing subfault sizes, consistently showing that the largest slip occurs up‐dip of the hypocenter near the trench. We use the set of models to test the sensitivity of available teleseismic, regional seismic, and geodetic observations. For the large Tohoku‐Oki earthquake, we find that the analyzed finite‐fault models are less sensitive to slip features smaller than 64 km. When we use the models to compute synthetic seafloor deformation, we observe strong variations in the synthetics, suggesting their sensitivity to small‐scale slip features. Our newly developed approach offers a quantitative framework to identify common features in distinct finite‐fault slip models and to analyze their robustness using regional and global geophysical observations for megathrust earthquakes. Our results indicate that dense offshore instrumentation is critical for resolving the rupture complexities of megathrust earthquakes.
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An adjoint-based optimization method for jointly inverting heterogeneous material properties and fault slip from earthquake surface deformation data
SUMMARY Analysis of tectonic and earthquake-cycle associated deformation of the crust can provide valuable insights into the underlying deformation processes including fault slip. How those processes are expressed at the surface depends on the lateral and depth variations of rock properties. The effect of such variations is often tested by forward models based on a priori geological or geophysical information. Here, we first develop a novel technique based on an open-source finite-element computational framework to invert geodetic constraints directly for heterogeneous media properties. We focus on the elastic, coseismic problem and seek to constrain variations in shear modulus and Poisson’s ratio, proxies for the effects of lithology and/or temperature and porous flow, respectively. The corresponding nonlinear inversion is implemented using adjoint-based optimization that efficiently reduces the cost function that includes the misfit between the calculated and observed displacements and a penalty term. We then extend our theoretical and numerical framework to simultaneously infer both heterogeneous Earth’s structure and fault slip from surface deformation. Based on a range of 2-D synthetic cases, we find that both model parameters can be satisfactorily estimated for the megathrust setting-inspired test problems considered. Within limits, this is the case even in the presence of noise and if the fault geometry is not perfectly known. Our method lays the foundation for a future reassessment of the information contained in increasingly data-rich settings, for example, geodetic GNSS constraints for large earthquakes such as the 2011 Tohoku-oki M9 event, or distributed deformation along plate boundaries as constrained from InSAR.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2121666
- PAR ID:
- 10478364
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Geophysical Journal International
- Volume:
- 236
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0956-540X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 778-797
- Size(s):
- p. 778-797
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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