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A stochastic approach to the characterization of the seismic sources: a potential method for the assessment of sources of historical and paleo tsunami

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Abstract

Inundation, wave arrival and deformation data gathered from measurement campaigns and historical accounts have been used to study past earthquakes and tsunamis, being crucial for magnitude and extension estimations. Nevertheless, the most commonly used methods cannot provide more information about the spatial characteristics of the event’s slip distribution. In this work, we aim to create a methodology for obtaining more realistic, heterogeneous estimations of the slip distribution characteristics of past tsunamigenic earthquakes, by obtaining slip patterns of each earthquake of the same seismic segment, thus establishing a history of the seismic cycle in a rupture zone. To obtain the stochastic characterization of the slip distribution of the seismic source, we combine fault defining parameters using a logic tree structure to generate random slip distributions which are subsequently submitted to successive restrictions to assess their compliance with the available deformation and tsunami data, discarding those that do not satisfy the constraints and using those that do to estimate the most probable seismic source in terms of the data. We test this methodology with synthetic heterogeneous slip fields off the coast of South Central Chile to assess its limitations, data dependence, resolution capabilities and uncertainties. Obtaining a good correlation between the synthetic observations and the locations of the main slip features. Finally, the 9.5 Mw, 1960 Valdivia earthquake is used to benchmark the methodology with real deformation and tsunami data from surveys and historical accounts. This result is then compared to slip distributions obtained with tsunami, seismological and deformation data inversions. This shows that the magnitude of the earthquake could be recovered correctly and the slip distribution is very similar to models calculated from different techniques.

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Acknowledgements

We wanted to extend our gratitude to Dr. Daniel Stewart and Dr. Patricio Winckler for providing insightful comments and tsunami data. All figures were produced using Generic Mapping Tools, GMT (Wessel and Smith 1998). Please refer to Journal-level guidance for any specific requirements. We want to thank the reviewers for their insightful corrections.

Funding

The present study is funded by FONDECYT project 11180854 “Source characterization for historical tsunamis of Central-Southern Chile”, directed by Ignacia Calisto, Ph.D. Additional support and funding by Iniciativa Científica Milenio (ICM) through Grant Number NC160025 “Millenium Nucleus CYCLO: The seismic Cycle Along Subduction Zones” was provided.

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Author notes

  1. Ignacia Calisto, Breanyn Macinnes, Marcos Moreno and Jorge Quezada contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Geophysics Department, University of Concepcion, Avda. Esteban Iturra s/n - Barrio Universitario, Concepción, 4081447, Biobio, Chile

    Rodrigo Cifuentes-Lobos, Ignacia Calisto, Marcos Moreno, Javiera San Martín & Matías Fernández-Palma

  2. Department of Geological Sciences, Central Washington University, 400 E. University Way, Ellensburg, 98926, WA, USA

    Breanyn MacInnes & Cristian Saavedra

  3. Departamento de Ciencias de la Tierra, Universidad de Concepción, Victor Lamas 1290, Concepción, 4081447, Biobio, Chile

    Jorge Quezada

  4. CTPA-Putemun, Instituto de Fomento Pesquero (IFOP), Castro - Chiloe, Chile

    Javiera San Martín

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  1. Rodrigo Cifuentes-Lobos
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ignacia Calisto.

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Competing interests

All authors declare that they do not have any financial interests. Original idea by Ignacia Calisto. All authors contributed to the design of the estimation algorithm. Software design and implementation were made by Rodrigo Cifuentes-Lobos, Ignacia Calisto, Javiera San Martín and Matías Fernández-Palma. Data collection and preparation were done by Cristian Saavedra. This draft was written by Rodrigo Cifuentes-Lobos and all authors have commented and contributed in it. All authors have read and approved this manuscript. All codes (v1.0.0) for the stochastic estimation of slip distributions can be found on https://github.com/RCifuentesLobos/PaleoTsunami/tree/v1.0.0 (Cifuentes-Lobos and Calisto 2022). This code is built upon ClawPack’s GeoClaw v5.5.10 (Clawpack Development Team. 2018; Mandli et al. 2016). All tsunami modeling was performed with COMCOTv1.7 (Wang et al. 2011).

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Cifuentes-Lobos, R., Calisto, I., MacInnes, B. et al. A stochastic approach to the characterization of the seismic sources: a potential method for the assessment of sources of historical and paleo tsunami. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 37, 2399–2411 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-023-02397-1

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