Global Prevalence of Anti-similar Earthquakes at Intermediate Depth

Abstract

Anti-similar earthquakes, those with nearly identical but flipped waveforms, remain an uncommon observation. We document three locations where these events occur at intermediate depth. The first of these is Colombia, including the well-established source of anti-similar events in the Bucaramanga Nest, and new reports in other intermediate depth seismicity clusters in the Wadati-Benioff zones of Colombia. The second is the Alaska subduction zone, and the third is the Vrancea seismic nest in Romania. These new observations, combined with reports from Japan and Chile, provide mounting evidence that anti-similar earthquake sequences might be a common or characteristic process of intermediate-depth seismicity. Either conjugate faulting promoted by eclogitization induced stresses or sub-parallel faulting can explain their occurrence at these depths. Careful examination of seismicity in other productive intermediate depth seismicity zones might reveal an even more widespread geography for anti-similar earthquakes and place tighter constraints on their underlying mechanism.