UC Santa Cruz

Large dynamic strains carried by seismic waves are known to trigger seismicity far from their source region. It is unknown, however, whether surface waves trigger only small earthquakes, or whether they can also trigger large, societally significant earthquakes. To address this question, we use a mixing model approach in which total seismicity is decomposed into 2 broad subclasses: "triggered" events initiated or advanced by far-field dynamic strains, and "untriggered" spontaneous events consisting of everything else. The b-value of a mixed data set, bMIX, is decomposed into a weighted sum of b-values of its constituent components, bT and bU. For populations of earthquakes subjected to dynamic strain, the fraction of earthquakes that are likely triggered, fT, is estimated via inter-event time ratios and used to invert for bT. The confidence bounds on bT are estimated by multiple inversions of bootstrap resamplings of bMIX and fT. For Californian seismicity, data are consistent with a single-parameter Gutenberg-Richter hypothesis governing the magnitudes of both triggered and untriggered earthquakes. Triggered earthquakes therefore seem just as likely to be societally significant as any other population of earthquakes.