[ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 4-Sep-2002 [ |
E-mail Share Share ]  Contact: Catherine Puckett United States
Geological Survey  New evidence for why earthquake swarms occur
offers hope for better earthquake forecasting  Better
forecasting of damaging earthquake swarms may now be more
possible after scientists helped to confirm a theory by USGS
seismologist James H. Dieterich of how and why swarms occur. The
scientists investigated a "super-swarm" of earthquakes offshore
Tokyo that struck in the summer of 2000. The research, by
Geological Survey of Japan scientist Shinji Toda, USGS scientist
Ross Stein, and Geographical Survey Institute of Japan scientist
Takeshi Sagiya, will be the cover article in the Sept. 5 edition
of Nature. Both Japanese authors were recent post-doctoral
scientists at the USGS in Menlo Park, California.  In the super-
swarm of earthquakes the authors studied, a staccato-like burst
of 7,000 magnitude-3 or larger shocks occurred over 2 months
about 100 miles south of Tokyo, un