Report on the August 2012 Brawley Earthquake Swarm in Imperial Valley, Southern California

Abstract

The 2012 Brawley earthquake swarm occurred in the Brawley Seismic Zone (BSZ) within the Imperial Valley of southern California (Fig. 1). The BSZ is the northernmost extensional segment of the Pacific–North America plate boundary system. Johnson and Hill (1982) used the distribution of seismicity since the 1930s to outline the geographical extent of the BSZ, defining boundaries of the BSZ as shown in Figure 1. Its north–south extent ranges from the northern section of the Imperial fault, starting approximately 10 km north of the United States–Mexico international border and connecting to the southern end of the San Andreas fault, where it terminates in the Salton Sea. Larsen and Reilinger (1991), who defined a similar geographical extent of the BSZ, argued that the BSZ was migrating to the northwest, which they associated with the propagation of the Gulf of California rift system into the North American continent. During the seismically active period of the 1970s, the BSZ produced close to half of the earthquakes recorded in California (Johnson and Hill, 1982; Hutton et al., 2010). However, for two decades following the 1979 Imperial Valley mainshock M_w 6.4 and its aftershock sequence, the BSZ was much less active. In general, the BSZ seismicity is indicative of right-lateral strike-slip plate motion accompanied by crustal thinning as well as possible associated fluid movements in the crust (Chen and Shearer, 2011). The 2012 Brawley swarm produced more than 600 events recorded by the United States Geological Survey (USGS)–California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN). Other monitoring instruments in the region, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) network, creepmeters, and the Wildlife Liquefaction Array (WLA) also recorded signals from the largest events. In addition, Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) satellites collected images from space.