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The HIPER Project: An International Collaboration on the Ecuadorian Margin

Description: 

The Mw 8.8 1906 earthquake that occurred at the Ecuador-Colombia subduction zone was a megathrust earthquake, with an estimated rupture length of 500 km between Buenaventura, Colombia to Manta, Ecuador. Its southern end has ruptured twice: in 1942 (Mw 7.8) and more recently in April 2016 generating another devastating Mw 7.8 earthquake, causing hundreds of deaths and millions of dollars in damages along an increasingly populated coastline. The seismological and geodetic network in place since several years and a dense international post-seismic deployment, contributed to observe and define the rupture zone as well as aseismic slip on the megathrust fault. In this region, episodes of aseismic slip have been recorded at the shallow updip part of the subduction interplate fault, in the form of both slow slip events (Vaca et al., 2018) and afterslip in the aftermath of the 2016 Mw 7.8 Pedernales earthquake (Rolandone et al., 2018). Those hints of transient slip behaviors, for which fluids have been invoked to explain their occurrence, bring Ecuador to the forefront of natural laboratories to study the link between fluids, interplate roughness, the nature of sediments, upper plate and lower plate’s structural heterogeneity in seismic/aseismic slip behavior.

Between 2020 and 2022, we acquired data of the HIPER Project based on an international collaboration funded by the French Oceanographic Fleet, the French ANR, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), American NSF and IG-EPN (Ecuador). It implies researchers, engineers and students from France, Germany, United States and Ecuador, giving us access to a large number of OBS (47), land stations (~200) and nodes (~500) to record both French R/V Atalante’s shots and the seismic activity. Our collaboration allowed a high density onshore/offshore deployment to perform shots and earthquakes FWI (Full Waveform Inversion), ambient noise tomography, receiver function, 3D earthquakes location and obtain a high-resolution multi-parameters image of the Pedernales earthquake rupture zone.

Session: Subduction Zone Structure From Trench to Arc [Poster]

Type: Poster

Date: 4/19/2023

Presentation Time: 08:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Andreas Rietbrock

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: 

Authors