Elastic and visco-elastic stress triggering in the South Iceland Seismic Zone due to large earthquakes since 1706

Abstract

Damaging earthquakes in the South Iceland Seismic Zone (SISZ) occur fairly regularly and often as a series of events with a few days only between individual events. Tolerably reliable information on epicentre locations and mechanisms are available for 13 M ≥ 6 events between 1706 and 2000. For these events, we computed the co- and post-seismic stress fields, hereby approximating the SISZ by a mixed elastic/visco-elastic layered half-space. The horizontal shear stress and the Coulomb stress changes were analysed to detect possible trigger mechanisms, which may aid future earthquake mitigation efforts. We tested several criteria but must conclude that the start of an earthquake series in the SISZ cannot be explained by triggering through previous events. Inside an individual series, however, one may infer triggering. Our results are in contradiction with the findings in other regions of the world. The reason might be related to the fact that the SISZ is not a mature fault zone, in which old faults are re-activated if a certain stress level threshold is passed. In addition, uncertainties in the model parameters as well as the neglect of horizontal variations in the model and of possible stress transfer due to volcanic activity further complicate the evaluation of our results and need to be taken into account in future studies.