Passive Seismic Investigation of Intraplate Earthquakes Epicentral Zones in the North of Russia as One of the Ways to Understand Their Source Mechanics

Abstract

Studying the inner structure of intraplate earthquakes originating in aseismic areas, which are poorly covered by seismic networks or as historical earthquakes is usually the only way to get knowledge about their source mechanisms, which is partially essential for a deeper understanding of intraplate geodynamics. The epicentral zones of earthquakes are situated in hard-to-reach areas, so, using active seismic methods for such purposes is unreasonable or even impossible because of high cost and logistical difficulties. We propose a novel approach that combines diverse passive seismic methods, which allows us to get sufficient information about geological environment structure for such task solutions. As an example, we investigated the inner structure of platform earthquake epicentral zone originated up north of Russia. We used four passive seismic methods: microseismic sounding method, passive seismic interferometry, HVSR method, and microseismic activity method. We show that passive seismic data, recoded in the same installation and processed by these different methods, can provide sufficient information about structure of studied environment, needed to explain source mechanism. In sum, the hypocenter zone is presented by intersection of vertical faults and a lateral fractured zone in the middle crust. Results were confirmed by comparison with results by active seismic methods.

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