Seismicity in the far Arctic areas: Severnaya Zemlya and the Taimyr Peninsula

Abstract

A permanent seismic station was for the first time installed on Severnaya Zemlya in the Russian Arctic. This made it possible to record low-magnitude earthquakes occurring within the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago and in the Taimyr Peninsula, which is the northernmost landmass part of the Eurasian continent. The present paper summarizes information on the seismicity in the area of study for the entire instrumental period of observation. The earthquakes that occurred during the earlier half of the twentieth century and for some earthquakes of the twenty-first century were relocated using all raw data and bulletins of seismic stations available today. Most earthquakes occurred in the mouth part of the Khatanga Bay with the Khatanga graben where the Khatanga-Lomonosov marginal continental fault zone originates and in the eastern Taimyr Peninsula. The resulting catalog with relocated earthquakes can form a basis for subsequent studies involving geodynamic models, the crustal state of stress and strain, and earthquake hazard assessment.