Figure 12. Comparison of the 2010 February 27 MW = 8.

8 Chile earthquake
and prior earthquake swarm activity. Left-hand panel: Colour filled circles show
updated

fault

slip

solutions

published

by

the

USGS

at

http://earthquake.usgs.goviearthquakesteqinthenews/2010/us2010tfan/finite_fa
ult.php. Open circles show aftershocks and filled black circles show prior
earthquake swarm activity. Right-hand panel: Red line shows the USGS slip
solution binned according to latitude. Light red lines show alternate slip
solutions, also available at the url above, by Anthony Sladen (Caltech) and
Chen Ji (UCSB) and can be used as a measure of uncertainty in the slip
inversions. Blue line shows number of aftershocks by latitude. Black bars show
number of earthquakes associated with earthquake swarms in the area.

the 2006 Copiapo swarm show a clear aftershock sequence which appears to
follow Omori's Law, but the rest of the swarm does not.
The inset burst at Ticsani Volcano (yellow earthquakes in Fig. 2) may contain an
aftershock sequence, but only 10 earthquakes were large enough to be
recorded which is too few to determine consistency with Omori's Law. The lack
of an observable geodetic signal does not rule out a broad underlying
mechanism driving these swarms, and deviation from Omori's Law may suggest
such a mechanism.
Interestingly, Holtkamp & Brudzinski (2011) show that earthquake swarms from
this and other convergent margins may follow the magnitude-duration slow slip
scaling law presented by 1de et al. (2007).
In an effort to use another method to assess whether the Copiapo and Ticsani
swarms are different from other swarms with aseismic slip, we have calculated
the static stress drop, which for the simple single uniformly slipping fault plane
used here is fault displacement (times rigidity, a constant) divided by fault area.
Low stress drops are common for slow earthquakes and may be ubiquitous for
aseismic

Figure 13. We plot the magnitude and frequency of earthquake swarms in

Japan Vidale & Shearer (from 2006) and South America (all swarms from this
study), normalized by the length of the subduction zone. Although the duration
and completeness threshold of the earthquake catalogues in Japan and South
America are different (see text), the swarms in the two areas follow
approximately the same exponential law. The two South American data points
circled are not included in the linear regression because the downturn in most
likely caused by these magnitudes being below the completeness threshold.

Table 4. Comparison of along-strike epicentral propagation velocities.

or slow slip events (Ide et al. 2007). Our geodetic stress drop for the Ticsani
earthquake is 35 bars, similar to a 'normal' earthquake. On the other hand, our
geodetic inversions for the 2006 Copiapo swarm result in a stress drop of 0.68
bars, which is over an order of magnitude lower than the average of ~10 for
interplate contacts (e.g. Lay & Wallace 1995), and may indicate anomalous
behaviour. We note that stress drop calculations for the distributed slip model
for Copiapo (Fig. 85, Supporting Information) were similar. However, since
much of the slip occurred off-shore, the InSAR observations do not place a
strong constraint on the spatial extent of rupture. Allirnann & Shearer (2009)
found that the stress drops of the two largest events in the 2006 Copiapo swarm
were much higher at 19 and 14 bars, which is expected as the individual
earthquakes still follow seismic scaling laws.
4.4 Triggering of earthquake swarms and volcanic earthquake swarms
We examined two of the three swarms associated with the 2001 MW= 8.5
southern Peru earthquake for the possibility of static triggering via Coulomb

stress changes. The swarms are not on the megathrust and are 100 to 200 km
from the ruptured segment so they are not aftershocks. Figs 510 and SI 1
(Supporting Information) show triggered seismicity near Coropuna Volcano and
Lake Titicaca, respectively. Small Coulomb stresses (defined as a combination
of shear and confining stresses) on the order of tenths of a bar, can have
enough impact to trigger seismicity (King et al. 1994).
Earthquakes have also been shown to be triggered dynamically, particularly at
volcanoes and hot springs several hundreds of kilometres away (Hill et al.
1993). More recently; seismicity has been shown to be dynamically triggered by
long-period surface waves several thousands of kilometres away (Velasco et at
2008).
Pritchard et af. (2007) calculate displacements associated with the 2001
earthquake by combining InSAR and teleseismic data in a joint inversion.Ve
used their inversion results to compute static changes in the Coulomb stress
field due to the 2001 Peru earthquake using the approach presented in Meade
(2007) for stress and strain due to triangular tensile and shear faults in an
elastic half-space.
For the seismicity near Coropuna Volcano, we use the CMT solution strike
(329) and dip (88) to construct the target fault for our stress change
calculation. Only one CMT solution for seismicity southwest of Lake Titicaca
exists and it is not consistent with the trend of earthquakes associated with the
swarm and so was not used. To be consistent with the trend in seismicity, we
used a strike of 50. Fig. S12 (Supporting Information) shows Coulomb stresses
resolved onto a fault plane consistent with seismicity near Coropuna Volcano.
Both the Coulomb and confining stresses resolved onto fault planes consistent
with swarm seismicity show very little static effect, on the order of 10-5 bars.
Coulomb stress modelling for the Titicaca swarm yields similar results
(Holtkamp 2010). It therefore does not appear as though these swarms were
triggered by static stress changes due to the MW = 8.5 earthquake.
The swarms in question did not occur coseismically but occurred days to weeks
after the event. The direct effects of dynamic triggering are linked to actual
propagation of the seismic waves, and will only last on the order of minutes to

hours, so it seems necessary

that some static triggering is involved.

Alternatively, a dynamic triggering mechanism that takes some time to manifest

could be responsible (e.g. Linde e al. 1994; Gomberg et al. [1998).
Since we discovered few volcanic swarms, their significance is not as well
determined as the swarms associated with the megathrust. With the exception
of the 2005 Ticsani Peru swarm, all volcanic swarms were associated with large
megathrust earthquakes (the 2001 MW= 8.5 earthquake) or volcanic eruptions.
Volcanic swarms detectable by our methodology in the north and central parts
of the South American margin do not seem to be associated with eruptions; and
volcanic eruptions in these areas do not produce swarms we could detect. In
contrast, eruptions at southern Chilean volcanoes are associated with sizable
earthquake swarms, such as during the Hudson and Chaiten eruptions. The
Cerro Hudson and Chaiten volcanoes both have infrequent eruptions, as their
last eruptions were ~3600 (Naranjo & Stern 1998) and ~8000 yr ago (Naranjo &
Stern 2004). Volcanic activity and volcanic earthquake swarms in the southern
volcanoes can be triggered by large earthquakes as well, as the MW = 9.5
Chilean earthquake triggered the eruption of Cordon Caulle, either via
movement of the Liquine-Ofqui Fault Zone (LOFZ; Lara et al. 2004) or via
bubble ascent (e.g. Linde & Sacks 1998). The large total moment release of the
swarms associated with the eruptions in southern Chile may be related to the
nature of the volcanoes, which may occur in cooler crust than their more
frequently erupting northern counterparts, or to the fact that a large fault system
is near these volcanoes (e.g. the LOFZ in southern Chile). Ticsani, the home of
the only swarm in the northern half of South America not associated with a large
triggering earthquake, also exists within a large regional fault system (Lavallee
et al, 2009).
5 CONCLUSION
We performed a search for earthquake swarms in South America and
determined their basic characteristics. We identified 29 possible earthquake
swarms within the PDE catalogue of varying spatial scales and tectonic
locations. We find that two earthquake swarms (2007 Pisco, Peru and 2010
Maule, Chile) may have some interaction with large megathrust events in South

America, based on, the observation that the termination of large megathrust
rupturis sometimes are controlled by where swarms have recently occurred.
These swarms on the megathrust may not have ruptured during the large
earthquakes either because they are areas where aseismic slip is manifest or
the fault properties change. We examine two swarms with InSAR geodetic data
(2005 Ticsani, Peru and 2006 Copiapo, Chile) and conclude that no large
amount of aseismic deformation is necessary to explain the observed surface
deformation, although some aseismic slip may have occurred. Seismic swarms
that appear to have been triggered by the MW= 8.5 2001 Peru earthquake are
examined and we find that static changes in the Coulomb stress field are too
small to be likely triggers of the events, indicating that some dynamic triggering
process may have been responsible. We examined the frequency-magnitude
content of our swarm catalogue and found it to be in agreement with the
regional swarm catalogue from Japan despite large differences in catalogue
duration suggesting that we are observing the same process on a different
scale. Although few volcanic swarms were found, we propose a possible
relationship between swarm magnitudes and the frequency of eruption, andior
the existence of large regional faults.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
InSAR data was provided by the European Space Agency via Category 1
project 3 I 94. S.G.H. was supported by a NASA Graduate Research Fellowship
and M.E.P. was partly supported by NSF grant EAR 0510719. We thank Larry
Brown, Mike Brudzinski and several anonymous reviewers for helpful comments