Abstract
The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow-on (GRACE-FO) satellites are important for studying regional gravitational field changes caused by strong earthquakes. In this study, we chose Chile, one of Earth’s most active seismic zones to explore the co-seismic and post-seismic gravitational field changes of the 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule earthquake based on longer-term GRACE and the newest GRACE-FO data. We calculated the first-order co-seismic gravity gradient changes (GGCs) and probed the geodynamic characteristics of the earthquake. The earthquake caused significant positive gravity change on the footwall and negative gravity changes on the hanging wall of the seismogenic fault. The time series of gravity changes at typical points all clearly revealed an abrupt change caused by the earthquake. The first-order northern co-seismic GGCs had a strong suppressive effect on the north-south strip error. GRACE-FO results showed that the latest post-seismic gravity changes had obvious inherited development characteristics, and that the west coast of Chile maybe still affected by the post-seismic effect. The cumulative gravity changes simulated based on viscoelastic dislocation model is approximately consistent with the longer-term GRACE and the newest GRACE-FO observations. Our results provide important reference for understanding temporal and spatial gravity variations associated with the co-seismic and post-seismic processes of the 2010 Maule earthquake.
Highlights
An Mw 8.8 earthquake occurred on the west coast of Chile on 27 February 2010, which was the fifth largest earthquake in the world since the instrumental record of seismicity [1]
Relevant studies have proven that the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) is effective for tracking the variations of large-scale spatial gravitational fields caused by strong earthquakes [14,15,16]
We expanded the corrected result to the 60th order according to the spherical harmonic In this study, longer-term GRACE data (2003–2016) with the new Release 06 version and the newest GRACE-FO data were used to explore the co-seismic and post-seismic gravity changes of the 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule Chile earthquake
Summary
An Mw 8.8 earthquake occurred on the west coast of Chile on 27 February 2010, which was the fifth largest earthquake in the world since the instrumental record of seismicity [1]. The earthquake caused serious casualties, extensive property losses, and permanent deformation of the rupture zone on the west coast of Chile. This earthquake has provided an important opportunity for studying the active tectonic deformations of typical plate collision belts and attracted widespread attention from scholars in the field of geosciences. GRACE has been used to detect the co-seismic gravity deformations caused by the 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule Chile earthquake using different types of GRACE data with different spatial resolutions [24,25,26], either based on global spherical-harmonic analysis with additional filtering to remove high-frequency errors [1,24] or regional solutions directly using GRACE inter-satellite tracking data at a certain spatial resolution [25]
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