Abstract
Recent studies of earthquake sources using strong motion and teleseismic waveform inversion have demonstrated the importance of asperities and non-uniform slip on the fault plane. The method consists of finding the parameters of a fault model that will reproduce the seismograms to some desired accuracy. The type of information that may be derived is either the moment release as a function of time from teleseismic records or the distribution of slip over the fault plane from strong motion data. We review studies of eleven earthquakes performed by this technique. These studies indicate that asperities and/or regions of high slip dominate the high frequency strong motion, and that this situation is ubiquitous.. Events in similar tectonic settings with similar mechanisms display some common patterns. Plate boundary strikeslip earthquakes studied show the strongest asperity at some distance from the hypocenter, whereas thrust earthquakes usually have the largest asperity at or near the hypocenter, which is near the deepest point on the rupture surface. For normal faulting events initial rupture is weak.
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Toksöz, M.N., Dainty, A.M., Nabelek, J. (1987). Earthquake Source Mechanisms: Case Studies. In: Erdik, M.Ö., Toksöz, M.N. (eds) Strong Ground Motion Seismology. NATO ASI Series, vol 204. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3095-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3095-2_2
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