New model may explain slow earthquakes

New monitoring technologies have enabled a closer study of such deformation, but apart from an observed proportionality between seismic moment and slip duration, little is known about how slow slip differs from ordinary earthquakes.

To help explain a wide variety of observed features, such as steady moment rates and scaled energies, characteristics of tremor signals, and the migration of source locations, Ide develops a simple model of slow earthquakes. In his model, slow earthquakes are represented as shear slip on circular faults whose radius is a random variable governed by specific parameters.

His results show that varying the radius of these faults could explain differences in the behavior of slow slip events worldwide, suggesting that all slow slip phenomena fundamentally follow the same mechanism.-American Geophysical Union