...... PNSN ETS HISTORICAL RECORD

Winter 2003 ETS

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Beginning in late February 2003, the PNSN started observing strange, long-lasting, weak signals on seismic stations in the north Puget Sound area. We believe that these are the same as or similar to the deep tremor observed in Japan by Obara. Because tremor had been primarily detected in volcanic areas, it is interesting that it has been observed in a non-volcanic region, likely associated with the subduction process. Seismic tremor has very different characteristics (e.g. smaller size, emergent onset) than tectonic earthquakes, making their detection by tectonic seismic triggering techniques extremely difficult. The PNSN has been developing techniques to detect these tremors for the past year.

This first real-time observation of a tremor episode by the PNSN began on February 26, 2003 and lasted until March 19th, when the bursts moved outside our network. During the same time period, a silent slip event occurred along the Cascadia Subduction zone. Other periods of tremor activity have been recorded on the PNSN in April, June, September and December of 2003, and in January of 2004. These subsequent periods of tremor are not associated with a recorded GPS slow slip event.

Below are two examples of an an early burst of deep tremor as recorded on two stations in northern Puget sound (Feb 27, 2003).

Station STW on the north coast of the Olympic Peninsula (tremor burst is circled)

Station JCW in the north Cascades

Scientists at the Pacific Geoscience Center in British Columbia report observing the same signals in Feb-March 2003 on their stations and, in fact, have observed these sorts of tremors in previous years. They associate them both spacially and temporally with slow slip events as detected by the geodetic network. They produced a Press Release on their observations and interpretations on March 12, 2003. The PGC also provides a more detailed description of the geodetically observed slow slip events.

Characteristics of Deep Tremor Signals

The Cascadia tremor signals have a frequency content between 1 and 6 Hz, and appear just above the noise on some stations without filtering, but on many more stations separated by hundreds of kilometers when the signals are band-pass filtered. The signals can contain single tremor bursts as well as a series of bursts and pulses over time periods lasting on the order of minutes to hours, and these bursts of activity persist from one week to a month.

Sample Spectrograms showing extended periods of tremor on Mar 3, 2003:

STW and JCW show semi-continous tremor between about 00:00 and 04:00 UTC with stronger bursts at about 00:35 and 03:05 UTC. Colorful lines going all across the frequency bands are bursts of telemetry noise due to radio drop-out.