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Baba & Cummins 2005
Baba, T. and Cummins, P.R. (2005). Contiguous rupture areas of two Nankai Trough earthquakes revealed by high-resolution tsunami waveform inversion. Geophysical Research Letters 32: doi: 10.1029/2004GL022320. issn: 0094-8276.

We have developed a new method for inverting tsunami waveforms that reveals considerable detail in megathrust slip during subduction zone earthquakes. Previous methods have ensured compliance with the shallow-water theory used to compute tsunami waveforms by using large subfaults that generate only long-wavelength seafloor deformation. We show that a better approach is to use small subfaults coupled with a smoothing criterion that ensures compliance with the shallow-water approximation. In an application of the method to historical earthquakes in the Nankai Trough, southwestern Japan, we find that the areas with slip > 1 m for the earthquakes of 1944 and 1946, which ruptured adjacent segments of the subduction zone, are separated by a sharp, non-overlapping boundary. This establishes that interseismic accumulation of strain energy extends very close to the boundary between rupture zones, and strongly suggests that this boundary is associated with a physical barrier to rupture.

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Abstract

Keywords
Oceanography, Physical, Tsunamis and storm surges, Seismology, Earthquake dynamics, Seismology, Subduction zones (1207, 1219, 1240)
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/
Publisher
American Geophysical Union
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