Abstract
Besides generating seismic waves that eventually dissipate an earthquake also generates a static displacement field everywhere within the Earth, causing the geometrical shape of both the Earth’s outer surface and of internal boundaries such as the core-mantle boundary to change. By rearranging the Earth’s mass earthquakes also cause the Earth’s rotation and gravitational field to change. Earthquakes therefore affect all three pillars of geodesy, namely, the Earth’s geometrical shape, rotation, and gravity. These effects of earthquakes are usually modeled separately, with flat Earth models typically being used to compute changes in site positions and spherical Earth models being used to compute changes in the Earth’s rotation and global gravitational field. Here, a unified approach to computing changes in the three pillars of geodesy is described. As an example of this approach it is applied to the 2004 Sumatran earthquake. A preliminary comparison of predicted and SLR-observed degree-2 zonal gravitational field coefficients does not reveal the expected step-like change at the epoch of the earthquake.
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Acknowledgements
The MINOS computer code was supplied to us by G. Masters whom we thank. The work of one of the authors (RSG) described in this paper was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Support for this work was provided by the Earth Surface and Interior Focus Area of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
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Gross, R.S., Chao, B.F. (2010). A Unified Approach to Modeling the Effects of Earthquakes on the Three Pillars of Geodesy. In: Mertikas, S. (eds) Gravity, Geoid and Earth Observation. International Association of Geodesy Symposia, vol 135. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10634-7_85
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