The Growth of Earthquake Clusters

Migration of hypocenters is a common attribute of induced injection seismicity and of earthquake swarms, which distinguishes them from aftershock sequences. Spreading of the triggering front is often examined by fitting the time dependence of hypocenter distances from the origin by the pore pressure diffusion model. The earthquake migration patterns however often exhibit not only spreading envelopes but also fast-growing streaks embedded in the overall migration trends. We review the observed migration patterns and show that in the case of earthquake-driven migration, where the new ruptures are triggered at the edge of previous ruptures, it is more suitable to examine the cluster growth as a function of the event index instead of time. We propose a model that relates the speed of seismicity spreading to the average rupture area and the effective magnitude of the hypocenter cluster. Application of the model to selected linearly growing clusters of the 2008 West Bohemia swarm gives an almost linear increase of the measured total rupture area with the event index, which fits the proposed model. This is confirmed by a self-similar scaling of the average rupture area with the effective magnitude for stress drops ranging from 0.1 to 1 MPa. The relatively small stress drop level indicates the presence of voids along the fault plane and a possible role of aseismic deformation.

Automated summary

Migration of earthquake clusters is often characterized by spreading envelopes and fast-growing streaks. Examining cluster growth as a function of event index, rather than time, may be more appropriate for earthquake-driven migration. A proposed model relating seismicity spreading speed to rupture area and hypocenter magnitude showed nearly linear increase in rupture area with event index. Self-similar scaling of average rupture area with effective magnitude suggests presence of voids along fault plane and possible aseismic deformation.