The April 24, 2013 Changning M s4.8 earthquake: A felt earthquake that occurred in Paleozoic sediment

Abstract

The dense broadband seismic network provides more high-quality waveform that is helpful to improve constraint focal depth of shallow earthquake. Many shallow earthquakes occurring in sediment were regarded as induced events. In Sichuan basin, gas industry and salt mining are dependent on fluid injection technique that triggers microseismicity. We adopted waveform inversion method with regional records to obtain focal mechanism of an M s4.8 earthquake at Changning. The result suggested that the Changning earthquake occurred at a ESE thrust fault, and its focal depth was about 3 km. The depth phases including teleseismic pP phase and regional sPL phase shows that the focal depth is about 2 km. The strong, short-period surface wave suggests that this event is a very shallow earthquake. The amplitude ratio between Rayleigh wave and direct S wave was also used to estimate the source depth of the mainshock. The focal depth (2-4 km) is far less than the depth of the sedimentary layer thickness (6-8 km) in epicentral region. It is close to the depth of fluid injection of salt mining, which may imply that this event was triggered by the industrial activity. © 2014 The Seismological Society of China, Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.