Dynamic Triggering of Earthquakes in Northeast Japan before and after the 2011 M 9.0 Tohoku-Oki Earthquake

Abstract

ABSTRACT Previous studies documented a relative scarcity of remote dynamic triggering of earthquakes in Japan and suggested that it could be related to Japan’s predominantly compressive tectonic regime or the more frequent occurrence of large earthquakes in Japan. For example, remote triggering in California, characterized by extensional tectonics, occurs at levels of stress change as small as 0.1 kPa, whereas in Japan, transient stresses ≥30 kPa are required. However, the dynamic triggering threshold in Japan, following the 2016 Mw 7.0 Kumamoto earthquake, has been found to be of just a few kilopascals, significantly smaller than reported previously. It was proposed that a decrease in the triggering threshold may have taken place in Japan, in particular at volcanic and geothermal areas, after the 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake. In this study, we analyze the possible change in dynamic triggering conditions in five areas in northeast Japan, where swarm earthquakes have occurred immediately after the Tohoku-Oki earthquake. The triggering thresholds in these five areas have been estimated based on the analysis of waveform recordings of 49 teleseismic earthquakes that occurred between 2004 and 2020. A decrease of the triggering threshold (or triggering ability) is apparent in all but one region. However, a statistical significance Kolmogorov–Smirnov test could not reject, at a 5% level, the null hypothesis stating that “the distribution of dynamic stress changes for triggering earthquakes that occurred before and after the Tohoku-Oki event is the same.” We interpret the changes in the triggering threshold to be related to the pore pressure increase (and thus a fault strength decrease) in the crust following the Tohoku-Oki earthquake. Our results also indicate that dynamic triggering in Japan is more common than reported previously.