Discontinuous boundaries of slow slip events beneath the Bungo Channel, southwest Japan

Abstract

The down-dip limit of the seismogenic zone and up-dip and down-dip limits of the deep low-frequency tremors in southwest Japan are clearly imaged by the hypocentre distribution. Previous studies using smooth constraints in inversion analyses estimated that long-term slow slip events (L-SSEs) beneath the Bungo Channel are distributed smoothly from the down-dip part of the seismogenic zone to the up-dip part of the tremors. Here, we use fused regularisation, a type of sparse modelling suitable for detecting discontinuous changes in the model parameters to estimate the slip distribution of L-SSEs. The largest slip abruptly becomes zero at the down-dip limit of the seismogenic zone, is immediately reduced to half at the up-dip limit of the tremors, and becomes zero near its down-dip limit. Such correspondences imply that some thresholds exist in the generation processes for both tremors and SSEs. Hence, geodetic data inversion with sparse modelling can detect such high resolution in the slip distribution.