Viscosity of Oceanic Asthenosphere Inferred from Remote Triggering of Earthquakes

A sequence of large interplate earthquakes from 1952 to 1965 along the Aleutian arc and Kurile-Kamchatka trench released accumulated stresses along nearly the entire northern portion of the Pacific Plate boundary. The postseismic stress evolution across the northern Pacific and Arctic basins, calcul...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science
Main Authors: Pollitz, Fred F., Bürgmann, Roland, Romanowicz, Barbara
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 1998
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.280.5367.1245
https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.280.5367.1245
Description
Summary:A sequence of large interplate earthquakes from 1952 to 1965 along the Aleutian arc and Kurile-Kamchatka trench released accumulated stresses along nearly the entire northern portion of the Pacific Plate boundary. The postseismic stress evolution across the northern Pacific and Arctic basins, calculated from a viscoelastic coupling model with an asthenospheric viscosity of 5 × 10 17 pascal seconds, is consistent with triggering of oceanic intraplate earthquakes, temporal patterns in seismicity at remote plate boundaries, and space-based geodetic measurements of anomalous velocity over an area 7000 by 7000 kilometers square during the 30-year period after the sequence.