The large aftershocks triggered by the 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake, Japan

Abstract

The Mw 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake that occurred off the Pacific coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, was followed by thousands of aftershocks, both near the plate interface and in the crust of inland eastern Japan. In this paper, we report on two large, shallow crustal earthquakes that occurred near the Ibaraki-Fukushima prefecture border, where the background seismicity was low prior to the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake. Using densely spaced geodetic observations (GPS and InSAR datasets), we found that two large aftershocks in the Iwaki and Kita-Ibarake regions (hereafter referred to as the Iwaki earthquake and the Kita-Ibarake earthquake) produced 2.1m and 0.44m of motion in the line-of-sight (LOS), respectively. The azimuth-offset method was used to obtain the preliminary location of the fault traces. The InSAR-based maximum offset and trace of the faults that produced the Iwaki earthquake are consistent with field observations. The fault location and geometry of these two earthquakes are constrained by a rectangular dislocation model in a multilayered elastic half-space, which indicates that the maximum slips for the two earthquakes are 3.28m and 0.98m, respectively. The Coulomb stress changes were calculated for the faults following the 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake based on the modeled slip along the fault planes. The resulting Coulomb stress changes indicate that the stresses on the faults increased by up to 1.1MPa and 0.7MPa in the Iwaki and Kita-Ibarake regions, respectively, suggesting that the Tohoku-Oki earthquake triggered the two aftershocks, supporting the results of seismic tomography.