Archive for March 21st, 2014

After major earthquake, silence: Dynamic stressing of a global system of faults results in rare seismic silence

In the global aftershock zone that followed the major April 2012 Indian Ocean earthquake, seismologists noticed an unusual pattern — a dynamic “stress shadow,” or period of seismic silence when some faults near failure were temporarily rendered incapable of a large rupture. The magnitude (M) 8.6 earthquake, a strike-slip event at intraoceanic tectonic plates, caused […]