The Skovorodino, 2011, earthquake

Abstract

On October 14, 2011, an earthquake with the magnitude Mw = 6.0 occurred 15 km northwest of the town of Skovorodino in East Siberia. This earthquake aroused interest among geophysicists. In this paper, we present some results on the prior seismicity in the region, which are based on the macroseismic and instrumental data. The assessment of the seismic regime immediately before the main shock and the analysis of the aftershock sequence rely on the data provided by the field network of the Schmidt Institute of Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The network was in operation from the end of July 2011 to January 2012. The analysis of the entire dataset suggests that the Skovorodino earthquake was outstanding in a vast region: only seismic events with low magnitudes (at most 4) occurred in the epicentral zone of this earthquake and its nearest neighborhood. The positions of the source of the main shock and the hypocenters of the after-shocks (more than 1300 events) are determined. The aftershock sequence is anomalous—it lacks sufficiently strong seismic events (M ≥ 3.5). The spatiotemporal distribution of the aftershocks shows two clusters of the epicenters to the west and east of the epicentral zone. These clusters drastically differ in their parameters, indicating that the source has a complex structure. Generally, the source can be understood as a shear displacement on the subvertical fault plane trending approximately along the latitude. The size of the source is 17 × 17 km; the average slip is 63 cm, which is at least 30% larger than the characteristic values for the earthquakes with M = 6.0.