Coseismic slip distribution of the 2005 off Miyagi earthquake (M7.2) estimated by inversion of teleseismic and regional seismograms

A large earthquake (M7.2) occurred along the plate boundary off Miyagi Prefecture (Miyagi-Oki), northeastern Japan, on August 16, 2005. In this area, large earthquakes (similar to M7.5) have occurred repeatedly at intervals of about 37 years, and more than 27 years have passed since the last event occurred. To estimate the relationship between this earthquake and the previous events, we determined coseismic slip distribution by this 2005 Miyagi-Oki earthquake by adopting the seismic waveform inversion method of Yagi et al. (2004) and compared it with that of the previous 1978 Miyagi-Oki earthquake. We performed two cases of the inversions; inversion using only far-field seismograms and that using far-field seismograms and local seismograms simultaneously. Both results show that a large slip occurred near the hypocenter and rupture extended to the westward deeper portion. Considering that the rupture area of the 2005 event partly overlapped with the southeastern part of that of the 1978 event, suggests this result the possibility that plural asperities exist which cause the sequence of Miyagi-Oki earthquakes and that the 2005 event ruptured one of such asperities, although the previous 1978 event ruptured all the asperities at one time.