Synthetic seismicity distribution in Guerrero–Oaxaca  subduction zone, Mexico, and its implications on  the role of asperities in Gutenberg–Richter law

Monterrubio-Velasco, Marisol; Zúñiga, F. Ramón; Rodríguez-Pérez, Quetzalcoatl; Rojas, Otilio; Aguilar-Meléndez, Armando; de la Puente, Josep

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-6361-2020

Articles | Volume 13, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-6361-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-6361-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 12

Model evaluation paper

|

18 Dec 2020

Model evaluation paper |

| 18 Dec 2020

Synthetic seismicity distribution in Guerrero–Oaxaca subduction zone, Mexico, and its implications on the role of asperities in Gutenberg–Richter law

Marisol Monterrubio-Velasco, F. Ramón Zúñiga, Quetzalcoatl Rodríguez-Pérez, Otilio Rojas, Armando Aguilar-Meléndez, and Josep de la Puente

Download

Final revised paper (published on 18 Dec 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 14 Jul 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'Comments on “The role of asperities in seismicity frequency-magnitude relations using the TREMOL v0.1.0. The case of the Guerrero-Oaxaca subduction zone, México”', Anonymous Referee #1, 11 Aug 2020
- AC1: 'authors response to RC1 comments', Marisol Monterrubio-Velasco, 07 Oct 2020
RC2: 'Comments on “The role of asperities in seismicity frequency-magnitude relations using the TREMOL v0.1.0. The case of the Guerrero-Oaxaca subduction zone, México”', Anonymous Referee #2, 01 Sep 2020
- AC2: 'authors response to RC2 comments', Marisol Monterrubio-Velasco, 07 Oct 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Marisol Monterrubio-Velasco on behalf of the Authors (08 Oct 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (09 Oct 2020) by Thomas Poulet

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (24 Oct 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The manuscript has been much improved from the original version, with a clearly presented Introduction. I only have some minor comments below, which can help further clarify some points and expand the discussion.

253-254: the statement is confusing and inaccurate. The fault length can be very long, e.g. San Andreas Fault, but the seismogenic depth (width) is limited by the brittle-ductile transition. An important question and reality is that no earthquakes can rupture an entire long fault system, therefore the actual ruptured aspect ratio is limited. The length/width aspect width of fault, however, can be very large and not be limited by 1 to 5.

Main (2000)’s conclusions on a fairly constant aspect ratio (~2) were made on older dataset. Using more updated ones, the scatter of aspect ratios is much larger. For dip-slip earthquakes, they are mostly below 8 (Weng and Yang, 2017). But for strike-slip earthquakes, some events have very large aspect ratios of ~40 (Weng and Yang, 2017)

Line 559: The quantity of energy inside the seismogenic zone is lower as Ra increases. What quantity of energy? The potential energy on the fault certainly increases with the fault area, i.e. Ra in this model. This is a problematic statement.

While it is well known that asperities play significant roles in earthquakes, the asperities themselves can be heterogeneous in term of initial stress or strength distribution, as indicated by geodetic locking distribution and a number of other observations. In the simulation, I think the heterogeneity was implicitly included by different cell conditions that may evolve over time. The characteristic (or largest magnitude) earthquake in an asperity may depend on the nucleation location, as pointed by recent numerical rupture studies with constraints from geodetic locking distribution. It would be interesting to see whether the nucleation locations play similar roles in such seismicity simulation, which can expand the discussion of this study.

Yang, H., S. Yao, B. He, and A. Newman (2019), Earthquake rupture dependence on hypocentral location along the Nicoya Peninsula subduction megathrust, Earth Plane. Sci. Lett., 520, p.10-17, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2019.05.030

Minor points:
There is a full stop in the title, very rare in scientific publications. In addition, the version of the software is very specific and not necessary. The authors may consider modifying the title into something like “Synthetic seismicity distribution in Guerrero-Oaxaca subduction zone, Mexico and its implications on the role of asperities in Gutenberg-Richter Law”

The manuscript is well written in general, but there are certain typos and grammatical mistakes. I listed a few below, and expect the authors to proof read the manuscript text to fix all of them. The following line numbers refer to the track-changes version.
Line 248: it is appears to
Line 249: roughly square with and aspect ratio

Hide

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (26 Oct 2020)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (28 Oct 2020) by Thomas Poulet

AR by Marisol Monterrubio-Velasco on behalf of the Authors (06 Nov 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (10 Nov 2020) by Thomas Poulet

AR by Marisol Monterrubio-Velasco on behalf of the Authors (10 Nov 2020) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

The Mexican subduction zone along the Pacific coast is one of the most active seismic zones in the world, where every year larger-magnitude earthquakes shake huge inland cities such as Mexico City. In this work, we use TREMOL (sThochastic Rupture Earthquake ModeL) to simulate the seismicity observed in this zone. Our numerical results reinforce the hypothesis that in some subduction regions single asperities are responsible for producing the observed seismicity.