The 2009 Samoa-Tonga great earthquake triggered doublet.

Great earthquakes (having seismic magnitudes of at least 8) usually involve abrupt sliding of rock masses at a boundary between tectonic plates. Such interplate ruptures produce dynamic and static stress changes that can activate nearby intraplate aftershocks, as is commonly observed in the trench-slope region seaward of a great subduction zone thrust event. The earthquake sequence addressed here involves a rare instance in which a great trench-slope intraplate earthquake triggered extensive interplate faulting, reversing the typical pattern and broadly expanding the seismic and tsunami hazard. On 29 September 2009, within two minutes of the initiation of a normal faulting event with moment magnitude 8.1 in the outer trench-slope at the northern end of the Tonga subduction zone, two major interplate underthrusting subevents (both with moment magnitude 7.8), with total moment equal to a second great earthquake of moment magnitude 8.0, ruptured the nearby subduction zone megathrust. The collective faulting produced tsunami waves with localized regions of about 12 metres run-up that claimed 192 lives in Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga. Overlap of the seismic signals obscured the fact that distinct faults separated by more than 50 km had ruptured with different geometries, with the triggered thrust faulting only being revealed by detailed seismic wave analyses. Extensive interplate and intraplate aftershock activity was activated over a large region of the northern Tonga subduction zone.

Anticorrelated seismic velocity anomalies from post-perovskite in the lowermost mantle.

Earth's lowermost mantle has thermal, chemical, and mineralogical complexities that require precise seismological characterization. Stacking, migration, and modeling of over 10,000 P and S waves that traverse the deep mantle under the Cocos plate resolve structures above the core-mantle boundary. A small -0.07 +/- 0.15% decrease of P wave velocity (Vp) is accompanied by a 1.5 +/- 0.5% increase in S wave velocity (V(s)) near a depth of 2570 km. Bulk-sound velocity [Vb = (Vp2 - 4/3Vs2)1/2] decreases by -1.0 +/- 0.5% at this depth. Transition of the primary lower-mantle mineral, (Mg(1-x-y) Fe(x)Al(y))(Si,Al)O3 perovskite, to denser post-perovskite is expected to have a negligible effect on the bulk modulus while increasing the shear modulus by approximately 6%, resulting in local anticorrelation of Vb and Vs anomalies; this behavior explains the data well.

Seismic detection of folded, subducted lithosphere at the core-mantle boundary.

Seismic tomography has been used to infer that some descending slabs of oceanic lithosphere plunge deep into the Earth's lower mantle. The fate of these slabs has remained unresolved, but it has been postulated that their ultimate destination is the lowermost few hundred kilometres of the mantle, known as the D'' region. Relatively cold slab material may account for high seismic velocities imaged in D'' beneath areas of long-lived plate subduction, and for reflections from a seismic velocity discontinuity just above the anomalously high wave speed regions. The D'' discontinuity itself is probably the result of a phase change in relatively low-temperature magnesium silicate perovskite. Here, we present images of the D'' region beneath the Cocos plate using Kirchhoff migration of horizontally polarized shear waves, and find a 100-km vertical step occurring over less than 100 km laterally in an otherwise flat D'' shear velocity discontinuity. Folding and piling of a cold slab that has reached the core-mantle boundary, as observed in numerical and experimental models, can account for the step by a 100-km elevation of the post-perovskite phase boundary due to a 700 degrees C lateral temperature reduction in the folded slab. We detect localized low velocities at the edge of the slab material, which may result from upwellings caused by the slab laterally displacing a thin hot thermal boundary layer.