What Triggered the Tremors in Nigeria on Sept 5-7, 2018?

Date: 4/24/2019

Time: 06:00 PM

Room: Grand Ballroom

On September 5-7, 2018, a series of low-magnitude tremors hit the capital city of Nigeria in Mpape, Abuja. This event follows a series of earthquakes felt on a stable, intra-plate region not expected to be earthquake-prone. This is bringing renewed attention to earthquakes as a potent natural hazard in the West Africa region. No global catalog reported this earthquake event, and preliminary analysis has resulted in speculations that this tremor was not local or regional, but could have been teleseismic. Due to the sparsity of seismic arrays in this region of the world, we explore single-station multi-frequency phase detection and polarization analysis to identify the epicenter and arrival direction of the tremors. We then cross-reference our detections with global catalogs and identify candidate locations and associated probabilities for their spatial targets. We propose improvements to the low-magnitude detection threshold of regional catalogs by conducting an extensive search of the waveform database using unsupervised machine learning techniques like convolutional neural networks.

Presenting Author: Yingping Lu

Authors