Dieterich J, Cayol V, Okubo P
US Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA.
Nature. 2000 Nov 23;408(6811):457-60. doi: 10.1038/35044054.
Stress changes in the Earth's crust are generally estimated from model calculations that use near-surface deformation as an observational constraint. But the widespread correlation of changes of earthquake activity with stress has led to suggestions that stress changes might be calculated from earthquake occurrence rates obtained from seismicity catalogues. Although this possibility has considerable appeal, because seismicity data are routinely collected and have good spatial and temporal resolution, the method has not yet proven successful, owing to the non-linearity of earthquake rate changes with respect to both stress and time. Here, however, we present two methods for inverting earthquake rate data to infer stress changes, using a formulation for the stress- and time-dependence of earthquake rates. Application of these methods at Kilauea volcano, in Hawaii, yields good agreement with independent estimates, indicating that earthquake rates can provide a practical remote-sensing stress meter.
地壳应力变化通常是通过模型计算来估计的，这些模型计算使用近地表变形作为观测约束条件。但是，地震活动变化与应力之间广泛存在的相关性引发了这样的建议，即应力变化可能可以从地震活动目录中获得的地震发生率来计算。尽管这种可能性具有相当大的吸引力，因为地震活动数据是常规收集的，并且具有良好的空间和时间分辨率，但由于地震发生率相对于应力和时间的变化具有非线性，该方法尚未被证明是成功的。然而，在这里，我们提出了两种利用地震发生率对应力和时间的依赖性公式来反演地震发生率数据以推断应力变化的方法。在夏威夷的基拉韦厄火山应用这些方法，得到了与独立估计值的良好一致性，这表明地震发生率可以提供一种实用的遥感应力测量仪。
