Tidal Coulomb Failure Stresses in the northern Andean intermediate depth seismic clusters: implications for a possible correlation between tides and seismicity

TL;DR

This study investigates the influence of tidal Coulomb Failure Stresses on intermediate depth earthquakes in northern South America, providing evidence that tides may trigger seismic activity in these regions.

Contribution

It extends previous analyses by calculating tidal stresses in multiple seismic clusters and assessing their role in earthquake nucleation using detailed focal mechanism data.

Findings

Tidal stresses tend to contribute to earthquake triggering, especially when calculated before events.

Tides may facilitate fault slip by loosening fault blocks in subducted lithosphere.

Results support a correlation between tidal forces and seismic activity in studied regions.

Abstract

A recent statistical analysis of the relationship between tides and seismic activity in Colombia has suggested the existence of correlation anomalies for the case of intermediate depth events in the Bucaramanga nest and the Cauca cluster (Moncayo et al., 2019). In this work, we explore in detail the hypothesis that tides may be triggering seismic activity in these regions and extend the analysis to two other seismic clusters in northern-central South America, specifically in the areas of El Puyo (Ecuador) and Pucallpa (Peru). For this purpose, we use the available focal mechanism information for seismic events at these locations, and calculate for each event the Tidal Coulomb Failure Stress (TCFS) as obtained from estimations of the tidal strain tensor. Tidal strains are computed considering the Earth body tides and the effect of the ocean tidal loading. Since our purpose is to elucidate the role of tides in earthquake nucleation, calculations of the TCFS are conducted not only for the time of earthquake, but also for the time of the closest maximum strain within a window of a few hours before the events. Our results tend to support the hypothesis that tidal stresses are contributing to earthquake generation in all the studied areas; this trend is especially stronger when TCFS are calculated at pre-earthquake times. The physical explanation for the positive contribution of tides to earthquake triggering in intermediate depth clusters may lie in the fact that a wide diversity of fault plane orientations is possible within a relatively small volume of subducted lithosphere, so making the tides more likely to help loosening up the blocks at the fault plane to promote slip.