Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The cause of the 2011 Hawthorne (Nevada) earthquake swarm constrained by seismic and InSAR methods

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Journal of Geodesy Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

We used both seismic and InSAR data to investigate the mechanism behind the 2011 Hawthorne (Nevada) earthquake swarm that occurred between March 15 and August 17, 2011. Regional seismic data were used to estimate the centroid depth and focal mechanism for nine earthquakes that occurred in this swarm, with magnitudes between \(M_w\)3.9 and \(M_w\)4.8. The inferred focal mechanisms indicate that the source of these earthquakes is normal faulting with a small left-lateral strike-slip component along the southwest direction. Three InSAR displacement maps covering the epicentral zone of the 2011 Hawthorne earthquakes were inverted to get a slip model. The slip distribution shows that the deformation source is characterized by normal faulting, consistent with our inferred focal mechanisms. Our results suggest that the seismogenic zone was in the tensile stress environment. The temporal and spatial evolutions of seismicity suggest that the 2011 Hawthorne swarm might be caused by aseismic slip. Therefore, the 2011 Hawthorne earthquake swarm may have been the result of aseismic slip under the regional tectonic stress, and had nothing to do with volcanic activity. However, the quantitative evidence for aseismic slip is limited to the indication that the geodetic moment is 15% greater than the seismic moment, which is near the level of uncertainty.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Bassin C, Laske G, Masters G (2000) The current limits of resolution for surface wave tomography in North America. EOS Trans AGU 81:F897

    Google Scholar 

  • Bennett RA, Wernicke BP, Niemi NA, Friederich AM, Davis JL (2003) Contemporary strain rates in the northern Basin and Range province from GPS data. Tectonics https://doi.org/10.1029/2001TC001355

  • Bormann JM, Hammond WC, Kreemer C, Blewitt G (2016) Accommodation of missing shear strain in the Central Walker Lane, western North America: constraints from dense GPS measurements. Earth Planet Sci Lett 440:169–177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2016.01.015

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bormann JM, Surpless BE, Caffee M, Wesnousky SG (2012) Holocene earthquakes and late Pleistocene slip rate estimates on the Wassuk Range fault zone, Nevada, USA. Bull Seismol Soc Am 102(4):1884–1891

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cheng G, Wang H, Luo Y, Guo H (2015) Study of the deformation mechanism of the Gaoliying ground fissure. Proc IAHS 372:231–234

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dziewonski AM, Chou T-A, Woodhouse JH (1981) Determination of earthquake source parameters from waveform data for studies of global and regional seismicity. J Geophys Res Solid Earth 86(B4):2825–2852. https://doi.org/10.1029/JB086iB04p02825

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gibowicz SJ, Kijko A (1994) An introduction to mining seismology. Academic Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Hammond WC, Thatcher W (2007) Crustal deformation across the Sierra Nevada, northern Walker Lane, Basin and Range transition, western United States measured with GPS, 2000–2004. J Geophys Res https://doi.org/10.1029/2006JB004625

  • Hill DP, Pollitz F, Newhall C (2002) Earthquake–volcano interactions. Phys Today 55:41–47. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1535006

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Holtkamp SG, Pritchard ME, Lohman RB (2011) Earthquake swarms in South America. Geophys J Int 187(1):128–146. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-246X.2011.05137.x

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Horton SP, Norris RD, Moran SC (2008) Broadband characteristics of earthquakes recorded during a dome-building eruption at Mount St. Helens, Washington, between October 2004 and May 2005, chapter 5, pp 97–110. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper

  • Ichinose GA, Anderson JG, Smith KD, Zeng Y (2003) Source parameters of eastern California and western Nevada earthquakes from regional moment tensor inversion. Bull Seismol Soc Am 93(1):61–84. https://doi.org/10.1785/0120020063

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lange R, Carmichael IS (1996) The Aurora volcanic field, California-Nevada: oxygen fugacity constraints on the development of andesitic magma, vol 125, chapter 2–3, pp 167–185. Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology

  • Lu Z, Wicks C, Dzurisin D, Power J, Moran S, Thatcher W (2002) Magmatic inflation at a dormant stratovolcano: 1996–98 activity at Mount Peulik volcano, Alaska, revealed by satellite radar interferometry. J Geophys Res 107(B7):2134. https://doi.org/10.1029/2001JB000471

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • NCEDC (2014) Northern California earthquake data center. UC Berkeley seismological laboratory, dataset. https://doi.org/10.7932/NCEDC

  • Okada Y (1985) Surface deformation due to shear and tensile faults in a half-space. Bull Seismol Soc Am 75(4):1135–1154

    Google Scholar 

  • Press WH, Flannery BP, Teukolsky SA, Vetterling WT (1992) Numerical recipes in FORTRAN: the art of scientific computing, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Reeves JA, Knight R, Zebker HA (2014) An analysis of the uncertainty in InSAR deformation measurements for groundwater applications in agricultural areas. IEEE J Sel Top Appl Earth Obs Remote Sens 7(7):2992–3001. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2014.2322775

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roland E, McGuire JJ (2009) Earthquake swarms on transform faults. Geophys J Int 178(3):1677–1690. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-246X.2009.04214.x

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shelly DR, Beroza GC, Ide S (2007) Non-volcanic tremor and low-frequency earthquake swarms. Nature 446(7133):305–307. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05666

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shelly DR, Hill DP, Massin F, Farrell J, Smith RB, Taira T (2013) A fluid-driven earthquake swarm on the margin of the Yellowstone caldera. J Geophys Res Solid Earth https://doi.org/10.1002/jgrb.50362

  • Smith K, Johnson C, Davies J, Agbaje T, Knezevic Antonijevic S, Kent G (2011) The 2011 Hawthorne, Nevada. Earthquake Sequence; Shallow Normal Faulting, AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts

  • Tuffen H, Smith R, Sammonds PR (2007) Evidence for seismogenic fracture of silicic magma. Nature 453:511–514. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06989

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • USGS (2018) Search Earthquake catalog, Earthquake Hazards Program. https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/search

  • Vidale JE, Shearer PM (2006) A survey of 71 earthquake bursts across southern California: exploring the role of pore fluid pressure fluctuations and aseismic slip as drivers. J Geophys Res https://doi.org/10.1029/2005JB004034

  • Wegmüller U, Werner C (1997) Gamma SAR processor and interferometry software. In: Proceedings of 3rd ERS symposium, pp 1687–1692, Florence

  • Wesnousky SG (2005) Active faulting in the Walker Lane. Tectonics https://doi.org/10.1029/2004TC001645

  • Wesnousky SG, Bormann JM, Kreemer C, Hammond WC, Brune JN (2012) Neotectonics, geodesy, seismic hazard in the northern Walker Lane of western north America: thirty kilometers of crustal shear and no strike-slip? Earth Planet Sci Lett 329–330:133–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2012.02.018

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weston J, Ferreira AM, Funning GJ (2012) Systematic comparisons of earthquake source models determined using InSAR and seismic data. Tectonophysics 532–535:61–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tecto.2012.02.001

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wood C, Kienle J (1992) Volcanoes of North America: United States and Canada. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhao L-S, Helmberger DV (1994) Source estimation from broadband regional seismograms. Bull Seismol Soc Am 84(1):91–104

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhu L, Ben-Zion Y (2013) Parametrization of general seismic potency and moment tensors for source inversion of seismic waveform data. Geophys J Int https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggt137

  • Zhu L, Helmberger DV (1996) Advancement in source estimation techniques using broadband regional seismograms. Bull Seismol Soc Am 86(5):1634–1641

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhu L, Rivera LA (2002) A note on the dynamic and static displacements from a point source in multilayered media. Geophys J Int 148(3):619–627. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-246X.2002.01610.x

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We also thank Charles W. Wicks of U.S. Geological Survey for his technical guidance in the deformation inversion. This work was supported by grants from the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41374037), the Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities (Nos. WK2080000053 and WK2080000078) and the SRF for ROCS, SEM (No. WF2080000021).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Xianjie Zha, Zhe Jia & Zhiyang Dai

  2. Department of Earth Sciences, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, 75275, USA

    Xianjie Zha & Zhong Lu

Authors
  1. Xianjie Zha
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Zhe Jia
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Zhiyang Dai
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Zhong Lu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xianjie Zha.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary material 1 (pdf 3203 KB)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Zha, X., Jia, Z., Dai, Z. et al. The cause of the 2011 Hawthorne (Nevada) earthquake swarm constrained by seismic and InSAR methods. J Geod 93, 899–909 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-018-1212-5

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-018-1212-5

Keywords

Search

Navigation