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MAXI3D: A Novel Offshore Earthquake Location Workflow for the Endeavour Segment of the Juan De Fuca Ridge

Ocean Networks Canada maintains the NEPTUNE offshore cabled network, which extends to the Endeavour segment of the Juan de Fuca ridge west of Vancouver Island. Endeavour is a highly active spreading centre, with hundreds of earthquakes occurring daily. This is the perfect laboratory to test earthquake detection, association, and location techniques. For seismic phase detection, recent deep neural-network methods, such as PhaseNet (Zhu and Beroza, 2019) and EQTransformer (Mousavi et al., 2020), show a vast improvement over traditionally proven methods, like STA/LTA detectors. Associating phases and locating events presents a more difficult problem due, in part, to the complexity of seismic velocities. Current deep-learning methods, such as GENIE (McBrearty and Beroza, 2022) and SUGAR (Tan et al., 2024), require regionally specific trained models and advanced computing resources. They also do not currently take advantage of robust 3-dimensional velocity models. We propose an alternative approach to these methods with an updated implementation of the maximum intersection method (MAXI; Font et al. 2004), dubbed MAXI3D. This implementation can both associate and locate seismic phases using 3-dimensional travel-time grids derived from local and regional seismic velocities and can provide robust hypocentre uncertainties without the need for machine learning techniques.

We present the early results at Endeavour for a unified approach combining the OBSTransformer detector (Niksejel and Zhang, 2024) with MAXI3D, and compare these results to the currently implemented automated location method (Krauss et al., 2023), as well as deep-learning associators and NonLinLoc (Lomax et al., 2000). Our workflow is designed to be easy to use and adaptive to regional seismic networks and heterogeneous velocity models.

Session: Network Seismology: Recent Developments, Challenges and Lessons Learned - III

Type: Oral

Room: Holiday Ballroom 4-6+Corridor

Date: 4/15/2025

Presentation Time: 02:00 PM (local time)

Presenting Author: Jesse Hutchinson

Student Presenter: No

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