Marsquake Focal Mechanisms from InSight Data: Understanding the Seismotectonics of Mars
Listen now
Description
Ross Maguire, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Seismic source parameters – including hypocentral locations and focal mechanism solutions – provide the most direct constraints for understanding tectonic stresses and deformation processes within planetary interiors. The SEIS (Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure) seismometer deployed by the InSight mission to Mars detected and located approximately 40 high-quality marsquakes. However, inferences about the present-day deformation and seismotectonics of Mars have been hindered by the non-uniqueness and technical challenges that arise when using seismograms recorded by just a single seismometer. In this talk, I will review what we have learned about seismic activity on Mars from InSight and discuss how waveform-based inversions of data from a single station have helped us gain a clearer understanding of martian tectonics. Several high-quality marsquakes from the Cerberus Fossae region appear to be consistent with an active extensional tectonic setting, while the largest marsquake observed by InSight – S1222a – was likely due to compressional stresses near the hemispheric dichotomy boundary. Ongoing work is aimed at gaining a better understanding of the uncertainties involved in single station moment tensor inversions and developing best practices for obtaining robust solutions.
More Episodes
Omar Issa, ResiQuant (Co-Founder)/Stanford University A study by FEMA suggests that 20-40% modern code-conforming buildings would be unfit for re-occupancy following a major earthquake (taking months or years to repair) and 15-20% would be rendered irreparable. The increasing human...
Published 11/13/24
Martijn van den Ende, Université Côte d'Azur Already for several years it has been suggested that Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) could be a convenient, low-cost solution for Earthquake Early Warning (EEW). Several studies have investigated the potential of DAS in this context,...
Published 10/09/24