The Mw 9.0 northeast Japan earthquake: total rupture of a basement asperity

Abstract

SUMMARY The Mw 9.0 off northeast Japan (Tohoku-oki) earthquake occurred on 2011 March 11 at the interface between the North American (NA) and Pacific (PA) plates. The occurrence of interplate earthquakes can be regarded as the sudden release of tectonic stress accumulated by the interseismic gradual increase of slip deficit in source regions. The inversion analysis of GPS velocity data for a seismically calm period (1996–2000) before the Tohoku-oki earthquake has revealed the existence of five remarkable slip-deficit zones distributed on the NA–PA plate interface along the southern Kuril-Japan trench. We analysed coseismic GPS displacement data for the Tohoku-oki earthquake with the same inversion method, and obtained the bimodal distribution of coseismic slip spreading over the southern two, Miyagi-oki and Fukushima-oki, interseismic slip-deficit zones. The maximum slip is 32 m for the Miyagi-oki slip-deficit zone but only 7 m for the Fukushima-oki slip-deficit zone. The extraordinarily large coseismic slip in the Miyagi-oki slip-deficit zone, where ordinarily large earthquakes with about 3 m coseismic slips have repeated every 40 yr in the past two centuries, suggests the total rupture of a 300-km-long basement asperity underlying much smaller-scale local asperities.