Recently, new findings on focal depth determination of oceanic earthquakes got published on  Earth Planet. Sci.Lett. The paper presents the idea that water reverberations can be used to determine focal depth of oceanic earthquakes. The research has been co-completed by associate prof. Huang Jianping as the first author, from School of Geoscience, UPC  and Niu Fenglin, Richard Gordon from Rice University.

The research develops a new technique for the accurate determination of the focal depth of oceanic earthquakes using water column reverberations recorded at teleseismic distances. Numerical tests suggest that the method is insensitive to the reference velocity model and can robustly recover the input focal depth of various types of earthquakes occurring at different depths inside oceanic lithosphere with an uncertainty less than 1 km.  The technique is applied to the teleseismic records of two earthquakes that occurred east-southeast of the Tuamotu Archipelago on 10/15/1997 and 07/11/2004 with a PDE focal depth of ∼10 and ∼12 km, and the results have supported the authors' viewpoints. According to the paper, the Z–H grid search method offers greater precision and accuracy than most cases when the water reverberations are not used.

For more information about the paper:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X15006275

Photo: Xu Hongyang

Editor: Bu Lingduo

Source: UPC News Center