TRANSIENT STRESSES AT PARKFIELD, CALIFORNIA, PRODUCED BY THE M-7.4 LANDERS EARTHQUAKE OF JUNE 28, 1992 - OBSERVATIONS FROM THE UPSAR DENSE SEISMOGRAPH ARRAY

The M 7.4 Landers earthquake triggered widespread seismicity in the we stern United States. Because the transient dynamic stresses induced at regional distances by the Landers surface waves are much larger than the expected static stresses, the magnitude and the characteristics of the dynamic stresses may bear upon the earthquake triggering mechanis m. The Landers earthquake was recorded on the UPSAR (U.S. Geological S urvey Parkfield Small Aperture Array) array, a group of 14 triaxial ac celerometers located within a 1-square-km region 10 km southwest of th e town of Parkfield, California, 412 km northwest of the Landers epice nter. No triggered earthquakes were observed at Parkfield. Multiple fi lter analysis shows that the displacements, obtained by double integra tion, are dominated by the fundamental mode Love and Rayleigh modes, w ith some higher-mode contributions for periods shorter than 10 s. Most of the surface waves propagated along the great circle path from Land ers, but a late arriving surface wave appears to have been scattered f rom the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We used a standard geodetic inversion procedure to determine the surface strain and stress tensors as funct ions of time from the observed displacements. Peak dynamic strains and stresses at Earth's surface are about 7 mu strain and 0.035 MPa, resp ectively, and they have a flat amplitude spectrum between 2-s and 15-s period. These stresses agree well with stresses predicted from a simp le equation using the ground velocity spectrum observed at a single st ation. Peak stresses ranged from about 0.035 MPa at the surface to abo ut 0.12 MPa between 2 and 14 km depth, with the sharp increase of stre ss away from the surface resulting from the rapid increase of rigidity with depth and from the influence of mode shapes. Because of the free -surface boundary conditions, the horizontal components of the stress tenser tend to dominate in the top 5-6 km of the crust, which might ca use triggered seismicity to have strike-slip or normal mechanisms. Com parison of dynamic stresses induced by the Landers, Loma Prieta, and P etrolia earthquakes at a variety of sites indicates that the Landers s tresses were not spectacularly larger than those induced by the other sources. Landers dynamic stresses were comparable to Coalinga static s tresses at Parkfield. The effective strain caused by Landers at Parkfi eld, where no earthquakes were triggered, are the same amplitude as th ose at some sites in Nevada where earthquakes were triggered. Comparin g various authors' observations of dynamic stresses, there is no obvio us characteristic of these stresses that correlates with the triggered seismicity.