Mauro Blanco

The 2010 Maule, Chile earthquake: Downdip rupture limit revealed by space geodesy

Radar interferometry from the ALOS satellite captured the coseismic ground deformation associated with the 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule, Chile earthquake. The ALOS interferograms reveal a sharp transition in fringe pattern at ~150 km from the trench axis that is diagnostic of the downdip rupture limit of the Maule earthquake. An elastic dislocation model based on ascending and descending ALOS interferograms and 13 near-field 3-component GPS measurements reveals that the coseismic slip decreases more or less linearly from a maximum of 17 m (along-strike average of 6.5 m) at 18 km depth to near zero at 43–48 km depth, quantitatively indicating the downdip limit of the seismogenic zone. The depth at which slip drops to near zero appears to be at the intersection of the subducting plate with the continental Moho. Our model also suggests that the depth where coseismic slip vanishes is nearly uniform along the strike direction for a rupture length of ~600 km. The average coseismic slip vector and the interseismic velocity vector are not parallel, which can be interpreted as a deficit in strike-slip moment release.

Ground Deformation Between 2002 and 2013 from InSAR Observations

Ground deformation is one of the main geophysical methods for volcano monitoring. Surface deformation patterns can provide important insights into the structure, plumbing system, and state of restless volcanoes. Copahue volcano is one of the most active eruptive centers in Argentina, and a major risk factor for the nearby towns of Caviahue and Copahue. Historic eruptive activity involved low intensity phreatic and phreatomagmatic events in 1992, 1995 and 2000. A new eruptive cycle is ongoing since June 2012, with several phreatic explosions and one phreatomagmatic—magmatic eruption on December 22nd, 2012. In this work, the Small Baseline Subsets (SBAS) DInSAR-based technique is successfully applied to compute surface displacements using the ENVISAT ASAR radar imagery during quiescent and pre-eruptive periods. Our purpose is to investigate possible sources of ground deformation to better understand the system behavior. Analytical models are used to interpret geodetic data and to constrain the parameters that characterize the source responsible for the observed deformation.

On the Generation of Late ERS Deformation Time Series Through Small Doppler and Baseline Subsets Differential SAR Interferograms

In this letter, we investigate the potential of the small baseline subset (SBAS) differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry (DInSAR) technique to produce consistent deformation time series by using data sets of SAR images with high Doppler centroid (DC) frequencies. To cope with this issue properly, we exploited an archive of SAR scenes acquired by the European Remote Sensing 2 (ERS-2) sensor after the February 2000 three-gyroscope navigation mode failure. Our approach is oriented toward the long-term investigation of large-scale displacements with low spatial resolution (about 100 × 100 m) by processing sets of SAR images without discarding scenes depending on their DC values. Our analysis involves a set of descending SAR data frames from 1992 to 2007 relevant to the Napoli (Italy) bay area. Comparison with contemporaneous Global Positioning System measurements clearly confirms the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Correction to “Coseismic slip distribution of the February 27, 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule, Chile earthquake”

[1] In the paper “Coseismic slip distribution of the February 27, 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule, Chile earthquake” by Fred F. Pollitz et al. (Geophysical Research Letters, 38, L09309, doi:10.1029/2011GL047065, 2011) the captions for Figure 1–3 are ordered incorrectly. The correct captions for Figures 1–3 appear here. [2] Figure 1. Rupture areas associated with historic earthquakes along the Andean megathrust and aftershocks of the February 27, 2010 event. Historical epicenters are provided by Centro Regional de Sismologia para America del Sur and aftershock locations are provided by the National Earthquake Information Center. White lines indicate the surface projection of the fault plane used to model the 2010 event. Nazca–South America relative plate motion vector is from Ruegg et al. [2009]. [3] Figure 2. Observed coseismic GPS offsets (black vectors) with 95% uncertainties compared with model horizontal offsets using the coseismic slip model obtained by the joint InSAR/GPS inversion, which is contoured in gray (values in meters). White lines indicate the surface projection of the fault plane. [4] Figure 3. Coseismic slip models derived from (a) InSAR data only, (b) GPS data only, and (c) combined GPS and InSAR data, with seismic moment indicated for each model. Contour interval is 3 m. Star symbol indicates the Global CMT epicenter.