3D models of slow motions in the Earth’s crust and upper mantle in the source zones of seismically active regions and their comparison with highly accurate observational data: II. Results of numerical calculations

Abstract

In the first part of the paper, a new method was developed for solving the inverse problem of coseismic and postseismic deformations in the real (imperfectly elastic, radially and horizontally heterogeneous, self-gravitating) Earth with hydrostatic initial stresses from highly accurate modern satellite data. The method is based on the decomposition of the sought parameters in the orthogonalized basis. The method was suggested for estimating the ambiguity of the solution of the inverse problem for coseismic and postseismic deformations. For obtaining this estimate, the orthogonal complement is constructed to the n-dimensional space spanned by the system of functional derivatives of the residuals in the system of n observed and model data on the coseismic and postseismic displacements at a variety of sites on the ground surface with small variations in the models. Below, we present the results of the numerical modeling of the elastic displacements of the ground surface, which were based on calculating Green’s functions of the real Earth for the plane dislocation surface and different orientations of the displacement vector as described in part I of the paper. The calculations were conducted for the model of a horizontally homogeneous but radially heterogeneous selfgravitating Earth with hydrostatic initial stresses and the mantle rheology described by the Lomnitz logarithmic creep function according to (M. Molodenskii, 2014). We compare our results with the previous numerical calculations (Okado, 1985; 1992) for the simplest model of a perfectly elastic nongravitating homogeneous Earth. It is shown that with the source depths starting from the first hundreds of kilometers and with magnitudes of about 8.0 and higher, the discrepancies significantly exceed the errors of the observations and should therefore be taken into account. We present the examples of the numerical calculations of the creep function of the crust and upper mantle for the coseismic deformations. We also demonstrate the results of estimating the ambiguity of the models of postseismic deformations in the vicinity of the source of the Great Tohoku earthquake of March 11, 2011, which were obtained by the method of orthogonalization described in the first part of the paper.