Washington, DC—The most powerful earthquakes happen at the junction of two converging tectonic plates, where one plate is sliding (or subducting) beneath the other. Now a team of researchers, led by Teh-Ru Alex Song of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, has found that an anomalous layer at the top of a subducting plate coincides with the locations of slow earthquakes and non-volcanic tremors. The presence of such a layer in similar settings elsewhere could point to other regions of slow quakes. Slow earthquakes, also called silent earthquakes, take days, weeks, or even months to release pent-up energy instead of seconds or minutes as in normal earthquakes. The research is published in the April 24th issue of Science.
The scientists analyzed 20 years of seismic data for southern Mexico, where the Cocos plate is slipping beneath the North American plate. "We can tell a lot about the material inside the Earth by the speed, strength, and interferences of different seismic waves," explained Song. "Typically, P-waves are the fastest, followed by scattered waves associated with variations in seismic wave speed within the medium. We used local observations recorded within 100 to 150 miles to map the structures at the top of the subducting plate."
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