Decay and expansion of the early aftershock activity following the 2011, Mw9.0 Tohoku earthquake

Abstract

The 2011, Mw9.0 Tohoku earthquake was followed by an abundant amount of seismicity providing a unique opportunity to analyze the triggering mechanism of great earthquakes. Although the Tohoku earthquake occurred close to a dense seismic network, many aftershocks that occurred in the first few hours after the mainshock are not recorded in the earthquake catalogs. Here we use a template waveform approach to recover as many as possible missing events in the first 12 hours following the Tohoku mainshock. Our analysis is able to detect about 1.4 times more events than those listed in the High Sensitivity Seismograph (Hi-net) earthquake catalog. Combining our new dataset with earthquakes that occurred at latter times, we are able to observe a continuous decay of the aftershock rate and along strike expansion of aftershock area. We relate the latter observation to the occurrence of postseismic slip over the deep interface. © 2012. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.