Viscosity of Oceanic Asthenosphere Inferred from Remote Triggering of Earthquakes

• 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: Arctic; Pacific; Kamchatka
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.280.5367.1245; https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.280.5367.1245

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.