Abstract
A moderate earthquake of magnitude ML 5.3 occurred in the Yellow Sea on January 12, 2011. We estimated the source parameters and found that the quake was a shallow strike-slip fault event with a moment magnitude of 4.6. The stress drop of this event, 1.2–2.0 MPa, is lower than that of moderate earthquakes inland and at the eastern offshore of the Korean Peninsula, and also that of the typical value for shallow intraplate earthquakes. A stronger event (M ∼ 6) in the southern Yellow Sea in 1984 was previously reported to have a low stress drop. Therefore the low stress drop is probably characteristic of earthquakes in the Yellow Sea region. We found that aftershocks of the 2011 Yellow Sea event, with magnitudes greater than 2, occurred for about 5 days, while similar-sized aftershocks of some inland earthquakes of the Korean Peninsula continued for several hours only. The lower stress drop and greater active aftershocks in the Yellow Sea region might reflect a different tectonic setting from that on the Korean Peninsula.
Highlights
A moderate earthquake of magnitude ML 5.3 occurred in the Yellow Sea on January 12, 2011, according to the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) catalog
Yellow Sea earthquake in order to see if there are any differences in the characteristics of earthquake generation in the Yellow Sea and on the Korean Peninsula
Chung and Brantley (1989) determined the stress drop of the 1984 M 6.0 (Ms 6.3) Southern Yellow Sea event (Fig. 2) to be 4.2 MPa and summarized the values of some large earthquakes (Ms 7) in northern China as [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20] MPa. They suggested that the southern Yellow Sea region is characterized by short recurrence intervals while the northern China region has very long recurrence intervals
Summary
A moderate earthquake of magnitude ML 5.3 occurred in the Yellow Sea on January 12, 2011, according to the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) catalog. The Korean Peninsula and northeastern China are thought to be located on the Amur Plate (Heki, 1999; Bird, 2003; Petit and Fournier, 2005). The 2011 Yellow Sea event occurred along the boundary of the Amur Plate suggested by Bird (2003) but was slightly distant from that suggested by Petit and Fournier (2005). The earthquake generation mechanism and the seismic features between the two regions, near the 2011 event and on the Korean Peninsula, may be different. The 2007 Odaesan earthquake, which is one of the largest et al
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