Determination and interpretation of earthquake source locations in Sichuan Province, China

This thesis involves locating and interpreting earthquakes from the Sichuan Province, China. The main contributions of this research are: successfully fitting the travel time data of three explosions to a two-layer crust model; and the improvement in locating earthquakes. To achieve these objectives, the Gauss-Newton method is applied iteratively to find the nonlinear least squares solution. The Monte Carlo method and the Gauss- Newton method were jointly used to locate events and simultaneously optimize the crust model. The iterative station correction method is adopted to compensate the incorrectness of the velocity model and to improve the event locations. The joint master event method can improve the location of the events near the master event. The modified Hypoinverse not only can locate events based on the spherical crust model, but can also jointly improve the crust model used. A three-dimensional crust model is next to be optimized and to improve event locations further. We also present geological interpretation about earthquake locations in Sichuan and their tectonic implications.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2001

Author dc:creator

• Sun, Youshun, 1970-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• M. Nafi Toksöz and F. Dale Morgan.

• Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/59098

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/59098