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Earthquake Diffusion Variations in the Western Gulf of Corinth (Greece)

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Abstract

Earthquake diffusion and the migration behaviour of seismic clusters are commonly studied to provide insight on the spatiotemporal evolution of seismicity and the interplaying driving mechanisms. Using a high-resolution relocated catalogue, we study the variations of the earthquake diffusion rates in the Western Gulf of Corinth during 2013–2014, a period with abundant local seismicity, including intense microseismic background, seismic swarms and mainshock-aftershock sequences. We treat earthquake occurrence as a point process in time and space and estimate the diffusion rates of the main seismic sequences and the background seismicity in terms of normalized spatial histograms and the evolutions of the mean squared distance of seismicity with time. The statistical analysis of the studied seismic sequences reveals that the mean squared distance of the hypocentres increases slowly with time, at a much lower rate than for a normal diffusion process. Such findings confirm previous results on weak earthquake diffusion, analogous to subdiffusion, in regional and clustered seismicity. In addition, seismic swarms associated with pore fluid pressure diffusion present considerably higher diffusion exponents compared to mainshock-aftershock-type sequences that are consistent with primary or secondary stress triggering effects and stress corrosion. The observed variations of the earthquake diffusion rates indicate the stochastic nature of the phenomenon and may provide novel constraints on the triggering mechanisms of clustered seismic activity in the Western Gulf of Corinth and in other seismically active regions.

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Data availability

The relocated earthquake catalogue dataset used in this study is available in Mendeley Data at http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/d6txydfpty.1.

Code availability

All codes used for the relocation scheme are freely available from the online sources cited in the text.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ian Main, an anonymous reviewer and the editor, Zordi Julià, for their constructive comments that helped to improve the quality of this work. We would also like to thank the personnel of the Hellenic Unified Seismological Network (http://eida.gein.noa.gr/; Evangelidis et al., 2021) and the Corinth Rift Laboratory Network (https://doi.org/10.15778/RESIF.CL) for the installation and operation of the stations used in the current article. This research is co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund- ESF) through the Operational Programme «Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning 2014–2020» in the context of the project “The role of fluids in the seismicity of the Western Gulf of Corinth (Greece)” (MIS 5048127).

Funding

This research is co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund- ESF) through the Operational Programme «Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning 2014–2020» in the context of the project “The role of fluids in the seismicity of the Western Gulf of Corinth (Greece)” (MIS 5048127).

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  1. Section of Geophysics – Geothermics, Department of Geology and Geoenvironment, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Panepistimiopolis, Athens, 15784, Greece

    Georgios Michas, Vasilis Kapetanidis, George Kaviris & Filippos Vallianatos

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  1. Georgios Michas
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  2. Vasilis Kapetanidis
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Michas, G., Kapetanidis, V., Kaviris, G. et al. Earthquake Diffusion Variations in the Western Gulf of Corinth (Greece). Pure Appl. Geophys. 178, 2855–2870 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-021-02769-0

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