Spatiotemporal Evolution of Source Properties in the

Colombia-Huila Seismic Sequence

Albert Aguilar * & Germán Prieto
*alaguilars@unal.edu.co
30 seconds abstract: Three earthquakes Ml > 5 have occurred near Colombia – Huila in less than two years. The
earthquake catalog from 2012 to 2018 in a big area around Colombia – Huila was relocated and analyzed . The new
locations show that the Altamira Fault and Nazareth dipping to the NW and seismicity is clustered towards their
intersection. A systematic search for more earthquakes was performed using template matching. More than 2500
new events were detected including some repeating families.

Of special interest in our catalog are the events that occurred near Colombia,
Huila where 3 events Ml > 5 have occurred on October 2016, February 2017
Figure1 .
(a) (b) Inset in (a):
and July 2018. In order to gain resolution in the earthquake catalog and the
A effects of this larger events on nearby faults, we focus on the catalog confined
NP by the dashed lines in 1(b) and occurring since 2016, we refer to this catalog
Nazca Plate hereafter.
CP Events Ml > 5
Caribean Plate
NAB
North Andean Template matching starts

Nazareth Fault Block

Algeciras Fault
System
SAP
South
Figure 2. (Top) Starting earthquake
Altamira Fault American Plate catalog shown as a histogram. Note
the bursts of activity accompanying
A

Ml 5.3 Ml 4.8
Ml 5.4
(a) & (b) the larger events (stars).

Cumulative number of events

(a) (Right) The template matching
A Inverted triangles
are seismological search was performed from
January 1st, 2016 until October g s

Ml 5.4
stations, earthquakes
10th, 2018, scanning a total of 822 lo
are color coded by a ta
depth and size is templates. 2526 new events were c
proportional to local detected(blue line), compared to ned
b i
1830 of the starting catalog (green
magnitude. m ing
line). Aftershock Sequences (AS): Co a tc h
Oct 2016 events have a short and e M
The recent seismicity near Colombia-Huila has been widely felt in big cities such as Bogotá and Neiva. All detections reported by Red Sismológica Nacional de la t
small AS, whereas the Feb 2017 p
m
Colombia (RSNC) from January 2012 until October 2018, a total of 4690 events are shown in 1(a). The inset shows the location of the study area in Colombia event has a much larger one. What Te l og
at a
indicating its tectonic setting . Also, the slip direction of The Algeciras Fault System (AFS) is indicated with green arrows. appears to be a foreshock sequence c
The 4690 were relocated using catalog and cross correlation differential travel times using HypoDD (Waldhauser & Elsworth, 2001). The results are shown in for the Jul 2018 is in fact i n ary
contamination of the catalog due to re lim
1(b), where the seismicity along the three major faults involved, the AFS, the Altamira and Nazareth Faults are projected to cross section A. The location and P
relocation show NW, dipping structures (extended with dotted lines), being the Altamira the one that reaches a higher depth. This structural parameter is in a burst of activity in the Nevado
del Huila Volcano. In fact, it had a
opposition to that proposed by Dimaté et al., 2003 and Velandia et al., 2005. Also, the larger events have occurred close to the contact Altamira-Nazareth.
small and short lived AS.

Template Matching calculates the normalized cross correlation (CC)
between templates and continuous data(Peng & Zhao,2009,
Chamberlain et al.,2018), as detailed by equation (1). Where CC(y) is
the CC at time y, t is the template, n is the number of points of the
template, "̅ is the mean of the template, c is the continuous data and #̅
is its local mean.
(1)
Daily Stacked Cross Correlation Function Figure 4. (Top) All detections for the same day as Figure 3, events in the starting catalog
are indicated with green vertical lines, those from which templates were built are
indicated with the red triangle. This particular day is a sequence of events near Nevado
Bottom detection del Huila Volcano, following a Ml 4.5. Notice that there are many detections for the same
event. The detection with the highest SCC value in a 5 seconds window was kept as the
official detection. The number 3 corresponds to the detection shown in Figure 3. (Bottom)
Hour of day Seismogram and envelope (clipped at small amplitudes) for a few hours at station PRA
are shown to validate the new detections (see Figure 1 b for station location location).

3
Equation 1 accounts for just one channel, then the cross correlation is
calculated for each channel at each station i (of a total S) and shifted to Repeaters
account for arrival time delays d and summed over the network
(Equation 2) to produce the stacked cross correlation function (SCC):

(2)
SCC detection value = 0.73 Hour of day
Bandpassed seismograms 2 –7 Hz
Figure 3 shows the SCC for the correlation of a template with one day
of continuous data. Once the SCC is calculated, all samples above ?
certain threshold are considered as detections. In our case our
threshold is 10 times the median absolute deviation (MAD) defined as:
(3) Bandpassed seismogram 2 –7 Hz PRA.HHZ
Templates were built from the events in the confined catalog keeping Envelope of seismogram

for templates those channels with a signal to noise ratio (SNR) higher
than 3 comparing 4 s before and 4 s after the P or S arrival. and with
at least nine channels. Templates are 6 seconds long, with 1 s before
the P or S arrival. All waveforms were bandpassed filtered between 2-
7 Hz as this is the bandwidth that maximizes the SNR for our events.
All the waveforms presented herein are bandpassed filtered 2-7 Hz.
?
Figure 3. (Top) Daily cross correlation function for template 20180707005735, a
Ml 1.3 at ~ 3.0 N, -75.9 during July 7th, 2018. Threshold and number of
detections are indicated. (Bottom) Waveforms showing the detection indicated
with in the top plot. Continuous waveforms are in gray and template channels
in blue, channel code is indicated to the right of each seismogram. Hour of day

Miscellanea
Earthquake Directivity
As of June 2018 we searched for suitable Empirical Green’s
Functions to constrain relative source time function, but found no
appropriate pairs of events. The search will soon be extended.
Instead, Aguilar & Prieto, 2018 calculated the radiated energies from
body wave spectra for three major events in 2016 and 2017 at
broadband stations following the procedure presented by Ide et al.,
2003, using the equation:
Where R is the focal mechanism correction, rho is density, v is
seismic velocity, r is source-receiver distance, f is frequency, f0 the
corner frequency, t is the travel time and Q to quality factors. All the
variables for P or S waves. The calculations showed the highest
energies to the SW for the three largest events of 2016-2017
regardless of their focal mechanisms. It suggests rupture
propagation to the SW.
Discussion
The contrast in dip and the offset between the Altamira and Nazareth faults may be acting as a barrier
that builds up stress and thus causes the elevated seismicity, but also this disconnection works as a
Repeating Seismicity barrier that prevents the nucleation of even larger events.
Repeating earthquakes, (i.e. events with high CC) are a mystery. As pointed out The amount of new detections of nearly 130 % more events than in the starting catalog is a low
compared to other studies involving similarity searches, as the quantity of newly detected earthquakes
in Figure 4 (top) repeating events can be spotted after scanning the templates,
is usually around 10 times as many as in starting catalogs. But, this numbers are appropriate given the
these events can be associated in repeating families. A couple of examples are wide aperture of the network. The causes for difference in aftershock behavior remain unknown.
shown below. The first is a repeating triplet whose magnitude and time The ? In Figure 4 points to what probably is volcanic tremor, there was a Ml 4.5 earlier that day that
evolution are indicated. Waveforms are shown after CC pick realignment and caused the burst of activity mentioned in Figure 2. But by observing long day seismograms on the
amplitude normalization. days and days after the big events there are many signals that are promising candidates to be tectonic
GARC.HHZ tremor very likely to occur in the Algeciras Fault System.
2016-06-01 Ml 1.3 We found repeating events along the AFS, but the search for those must be extended aiming to
47 days understand its relation to what seems to be earthquake triggering.
2016-07-18 Ml 1.9
1 second 60 days
2016-09-26 Ml 2.7 Selected References
F. Waldhauser, W L. Ellsworth; A Double-Difference Earthquake Location Algorithm: Method and Application to the Northern Hayward Fault,
California. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America ; 90 (6): 1353–1368. doi: https://doi.org/10.1785/0120000006.
Repeating pair in the AFS (see Figure 1 for station location) at 4.48 , -73.46. F Velandia, J Acosta, R Terraza, H VillegasThe current tectonic motion of the Northern Andes along the Algeciras Fault System in SW Colombia
Tectonophysics 399 (1-4), 313-329.
CHI.HHZ CC=0.982 ORTC.HHZ CC = 0.899 C Dimaté et al., Seismotectonique des Cordilleres Centrale et Orientale Colombiennes. PhD Thesis. Université Louis Pasteur – Strasbourg. 2003.
C J. Chamberlain, C J. Hopp, C M. Boese, E Warren-Smith, D Chambers, S X. Chu, K Michailos, J Townend; EQcorrscan: Repeating and
Near-Repeating Earthquake Detection and Analysis in Python. Seismological Research Letters ; 89 (1): 173–181.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1785/0220170151.
Top 2017-08-31 Ml 2.0 Acknowledgements
Bottom 2017-09-04 Ml 1.3 The computations in this work were run on the Odyssey cluster supported by the
FAS Division of Science, Research Computing Group at Harvard University.