Years of seismicity on the Reykjanes Peninsula, SW Iceland

Abstract

Reykjanes Peninsula (SW Iceland) is an extraordinary place from the geophysical perspective. Lying on the on-shore part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, interlaced by volcanic systems and hosting several high temperature geothermal areas, the seismic activity on the Peninsula is generally persistent on a microseismic level, but occasionally reaching up to ML~5-6. Throughout the years, many temporary seismic stations or small to medium size local seismic networks have been deployed there for various purposes, from geothermal prospection monitoring to short time passive seismic experiments. We analyzed 10 years of natural seismicity recorded by the semi-permanent local seismic network REYKJANET (in operation since 2013) together with several permanent stations of the SIL regional seismic network present in the area of interest, in total number of 22 stations covering an area of about 1200 km2. The timespan, 2013-2022, contains times of relative quiescence, several small tectonic earthquake swarms as well as very active periods of volcano-tectonic origin, with dyke intrusions and larger earthquakes of magnitudes up to ML- 5.4. We study the distribution of epicenters of the background seismicity as well as for the several seismically active periods with a consistent set of stations.We compare several different automatically derived earthquake catalogues using different detection and location algorithms, and their common features such as the upper and lower limit of the epicenter occurrence, seismogenic faults, aseismic zones and void areas. The dataset contains dyke intrusions related events during the the 2021-2022 Fagradalsfjall volcano-tectonic event.Depending on the exact quality criteria and method used, we deal with over 100,000 events with high quality stable locations imaging the subsurface beneath the Reykjanes Peninsula.