In a paper published today in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA), Fred Pollitz of the U.S. Geological Survey and co-authors suggests that the Indian Ocean earthquake caused short-term dynamic stressing of a global system of faults. Across the planet, there are faults that are close to failure and ready to rupture. It may be, suggests Pollitz and his colleagues, that a large quake encourages short-term triggering of these close-to-failure faults but also relieves some of the stress that has built up along these faults. Large magnitude events would not occur until tectonic movement loads stress back on to the faults at the ready-to-fail levels they reached before the main shock.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 16:01:52 +0000
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