Spatio Temporal Evolution of Source Properties

in the Colombia Huila Seismic Sequence

Albert Leonardo Aguilar Suarez

Advisor
Germán Andrés Prieto Gómez

Thesis submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements to the title of Geologist

March 2018
Departamento de Geociencias
Facultad de Ciencias
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
 ... thus it is difficult and sometimes pointless to define where seismology ends and
tectonics begins, and viceversa ...
Seth Stein & Michael Wysession
Contents
1 Tectonic Setting 4

2 The Sequence 5

3 Earthquake Relocation 5

4 Earthquake detection 10

5 Repeating seismicity 16

6 Earthquake Energy 17

7 Brief Discussion 17

8 Not the Conclusions 18

References 20

3
Introduction
Assessing earthquake hazards is instrumental to the development of large populated
areas, for their disaster preparation and risk mitigation programs. Bogotá has a pop-
ulation of around nine million people. Given the geology of the city, its situation
regarding earthquakes is a matter to be worried. As it happens with many large urban
areas around the world, Bogotá was built on top the sediments that filled an ancient
lake. As a consequence, the materials are poorly compacted and usually water sat-
urated. These properties are security concerns, given the behavior of such materials
during the passage of seismic waves. This work provides new insights into one of the
most important sources of seismic hazard for Bogotá, as well as for other major cities
in Colombia, such as Neiva, Ibagué and Villavicencio. We focus on the northern ter-
mination of the Algeciras Fault System, where the largest earthquakes close to Bogotá
in the last ten years have occurred. The northern termination of this fault system is
thought to have produced one of the largest historical crustal earthquakes in Colombia,
the M 7.0 Los Cauchos - Huila 1967 earthquake [17], [16], [15].
It is well known that earthquake catalogs are especially incomplete in periods around
big events as earthquakes are induced and triggered by the big ones [6], [9],[2]. Here
we present an improvement of the earthquake catalog of the northern AFS, in terms of
location trough a double difference relocation and in terms of number of earthquakes
we employed a similarity search via wavefrom template matching. We explore some
interesting patterns found during the relocation and the similarity search.

1 Tectonic Setting
The shallow seismicity of Colombia is dominated by those earthquakes occurring along
the Algeciras Fault System (AFS), a strike-slip fault system that runs from Equator
to eastern Colombia as a consequence of slip partitioning in the Pacific coast of South
America [1],[16], where the Cocos plate subducts underneath the South American plate.
Elaborating on these interactions, it is importatnt to mention that the Northwestern
corner of South America is under the influence of the subduction of the Nazca Plate
-NP- in its Pacific margin, the collision of the Panamá block and the subduction of
the Caribbean Plate -CP- (see Figure 1). Slip in the Pacific margin of Colombia is
partitioned between normal to trench and parallel to trench components, causing right
lateral slip along the Algeciras Fault System, fault system that corresponds to the
southern border of the North Andean Block -NAB- and the South American Plate -
SAP-. Shallow seismicity in Colombia is dominated by those earthquakes occurring
along the AFS and along the Eastern Foothills of the Eastern Cordillera. Both features
occur in the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia. The area in which we focus is the northern
termination of the AFS, where the main faulting style transitions from strike slip to
reverse slip. The reasons will be explained in the next section.

4
2 The Sequence
On October 31st, 2016 a Local Magnitude 5.3 earthquake struck near Colombia, in the
Huila state (Yes, the town has the same name as the country). It is located in the South
Central Region of Colombia. Then, in February 2017 a ML 5.4 occurred close to the
location of the former one. Finally in July 19th 2018, another ML 5.4 took place in the
same region. These earthquakes were widely felt in major cities in Colombia including
Bogotá, Ibagué, Neiva and Villavicencio (see Figure for location). Furthermore, these
big events have left no casualties but triggered landslides and rockfalls. Also, it caused
evacuations in office buildings and schools in the cities mentioned before. These events
caused minor damage in the closest town -Colombia-, particularly the belltower of the
local church and some houses. These events have occurred in the northern termination
of the AFS, specifically in one of its ramifications: The Altamira Fault System (Figure
1.
The analysis presented herein takes as a starting point the earthquake catalog pub-
lished by Red Sismológica Nacional de Colombia (RSNC) from January 1st, 2012 until
October 10th, 2018. The former dates refer to the time span of the events used for
relocation. In order to gain resolution around the larger events the template matching
was performed starting January 1st, 2016 ending in October 2018 the. The preliminary
catalog, shown as a histogram in Figure 2 demonstrates that there are bursts of activ-
ities following the big events mentioned berefore. The origin times of these big events
are signaled with the stars. It is remarkable that since the establishment of RSNC in
1993 there are no reported events with Ml larger that 5 before 2016. Then, in less than
two years there are three events which magnitude is above 5.

3 Earthquake Relocation
Hypocenters were relocated using differential travel times from earthquake catalog and
from waveform cross correlation for both P and S waves, using the HypoDD program
by Waldhauser & Ellswoth [8]. The reader is referred to the original publication for
details in the procedure. It is not discussed here for brevity. The starting locations
are those shown in Figure 1. Those locations correspond to 4690 events contained in
the earthquake catalog reported by RSNC. All this catalog was the input for the utility
program ph2dt with the following constraints: 1) only stations less than 800 km away
from the hypocenter were used. 2) Only pairs of events which hypocenters are less
than 20 km away are used to calculate differential travel times from catalog picks. A
weighting scheme was applied such that impulsive P wave arrivals have a weight of
1.0 while emergent P wave arrivals have a weight of 0.7. In the case of S waves, the
weights are 0.9 and 0.6 for impulsive and emergent arrivals respectively. For the case of
waveform cross correlation differential travel times calculation, a window of 4 seconds
spanning 1 second before and three seconds after the P or S wave pick was used to

5
Figure 1: Locations reported by RSNC from 2012 until October 2018. The inset to
the right shows the plates interacting in the NW corner of South America. CP is
Caribbean Plate, NP Nazca Plate, SAP South American Plate and NAB stands for
North Andean Block. SHown in red with triangles are active subduction zones. The
green line indicates with arrows the trace and the slip direction of the Algeciras Fault
System.

6
Figure 2: Earthquake catalog as a histogram. The bursts of activity correspond to the
larger events signaled by the stars.

calculate the cross correlation function. The maximum allowed shift was 3 seconds.
All the waveforms were bandpassed between 2 to 7 Hz. The selection of the frequency
band will be explained in the earthquake detection section.
After the relocation was performed, only 1966 events remained. The results are
shown in Figure 3 where the main faults involved are highlighted.The green line is the
surface trace of the Algeciras Fault System. The Nazareth and Altamira faults are
shown in red. Notice how the cloud of seismicity to the NW of the town Colombia is
collapsed by the relocation to a smaller cloud in the fault step between the Nazareth
and Altamira Faults. Cross section A will serve to our inference of the deeper structure
of the aforementioned faults. The inset in the left top corner of Figure 3 shows a profile
of the preliminary catalog in a 20 km band projected to line A. The same applies for
the relocation map. It is notable in the locations that the seismogenic zone dips to the
NW at an angle of around 30 degrees and one can see two planes, one shallower than
the other. From Figure 1 it is observable that the events to the left of line A are deeper
than those to the right. This initial observation shows the offset between the Altamira
and Nazareth faults while it shows that they both have approximately the same dip.
In addition, seismicity is clustered towards the interfaces of the velocity model, which
is the explanation for the layers of earthquakes observed in the cross section.
The relocation map shows the refined relocations, it looks sharper but we need
to keep in mind that more than half of the catalog did not meet the criteria to be
relocated. At first the big cluster of earthquakes to the NW of Colombia -the town-
gets concentrated near the fault jump between the Altamira and the Nazareth faults
The cross section of the relocated seismicity (right bottom in Figure 3 clearly shows
two structures with different dips, as indicated by the dotted lines. One of those has a
dip of nearly 35 degrees and the other of around 60 degrees. From the map view, one
sees that there are no deep events associated with the Altamira fault until it reaches
the Nazareth fault. On the other hand, the Nazareth fault exhibits some fairly deep

7
Figure 3: Relocated seismicity. The main faults involved are shown in red and green.
The horizontal scale of cross sections is distance in geographical degrees. Inverted
triangles show seismological stations that were used in this study.

8
events to the NW of the fault trace ( what is meant with fairly deep is just to refer to
earthquakes that relate to a fault in the surface which are deeper than those occurring
in the surface trace of a fault). Summarizing, the burst of activity of the last few years
have been occurring between these two faults. Furthermore, the relocation doesn’t show
a clear image of the Algeciras main trace.
The geometry observed herein regarding the Algeciras and Nazareth faults is in
ooposition to that proposed by [17] and [16]. M.C. Dimaté in her 2003 Ph.D. thesis
proposed the Altamira fault system as a SE dipping structure based on the earthquake
catalog available at the time. One have to acknowledge that the coverage of the network
was way poorer and the detection capabilities of the RSNC way less powerful. Velandia
et al., 2005 stated that the Altamira system is a transpressive zone with the faults
dipping to the SE based on the interpretation of satelite images.
We will elaborate on the implications of the observed geometry in the discussion
section.

9
4 Earthquake detection
Aiming to improve the resolution of foreshock and aftershock evolution in the Colombia
sequence, earthquake detection through Template Matching was performed. The search
started in January 1, 2016 until October 10, 2018. Templates were extracted from day-
long continuous data bandpassed filtered between 2 and 7 Hz to better isolate body
wave phases, because this is the frequency band that maximizes the signal to noise ratio
for these events. For each channel of the continuous data given a pick for a particular
event the SNR was checked comparing the five seconds prior to the arrival and the
subsequent five seconds, if the SNR exceded a value of 3, the given channel was kept
for template extraction. Each channel of the template consists of 1 second before the
pick and 5 seconds after. A brief explanation of the template matching -matched filter-
technique is presented here. However, if the reader wants more detail he/she is referred
to [10], [6] and [2]
Template matching calculates the similarity between templates and continuous data.
This similarity is quantified via the cross correlation between the two time series. A
simple form to express is the following:
Pn
x=0 (t(x) − t)(c(x + y) − c(y))
CC(y) = q (1)
(t(x) − t)2 (c(x + y) − c(y))2
Pn Pn
x=0 x=0

where CC(y) is the cross correlation at time y, t is the template, n is the number
of points of the template. t is the mean of the template data. c is the continuous data
and c its mean. In other words, the cross correlation is the dot product of the two
time series vectors divided by the product of the two vector norms. This calculation
is performed in a sliding window that moves the template y sample points at a time.
The calculations presented here were performed used a timestep of 0.05 seconds, that
means moving one data point at a time in time series sampled at 20 Hz. The result of
such calculation is a cross correlation value for each data point in the continuous data,
i.e. a new time series, we refer to that from here on as the cross correlation function.
Equation 1 accounts for the cross correlation between one channel of continuous data
with one channel of template data. Given that the purpose is to detect the signal
network wide, the cross correlation has to be calculated using all available template
and continuous channels. Thus, there is a cross correlation function for each channel.
Those functions are stacked as explained by Equation 2.
S
1X
SCC(y) = di hCCi (y)i (2)
S i=1
Once the cross correlation function has been calculated for each channel i, a shift is
applied to each one of the in order to align them as if the template event was aligned
to put all the picks at zero time. d denotes such operation, the delay operation. After

10
the alignment of the S cross correlation functions, they are stacked and the result is
the Stacked Cross Correlation function (SCC).
An example is shown in Figure 4. The top plot shows an SCC for a template in
particular scanned trough a day of continuous data, specifically the day in which the
template event occur. A few minutes before 1 am, there is a detection with a SCC
value of 1.0, it means that the template and the local continuous data are exactly the
same. In this case it means that the template is detecting itself perfectly. After the
SCC is in place, a threshold to declare detections must be set. In this case we chose
ten times the median absolute deviation (MAD) as it is a consistent metric and also
insensitive to outliers (Equation 3). The top plot in Figure 4 also shows the detection
threshold as the red dashed line. Moreover, the numerical value of this threshold is also
indicated. There is a good example of a detection at 14:26 pm. The bottom plot shows
the position of the template waveforms with respect to the continuous data. The SCC
of this detection is 0.73 and is a brand new detection.

M AD = median(|SCC|) (3)
The matched filter search was performed using continuous data from 17 RSNC
stations (BET, CHI, FLO2, GUY2C, MARO, ORTC, PRA, ROSC, YOT, CCALA,
CONO, GARC, MACC, NOR, PAL, PTGC, VIL) the reader is referred to appendix A
for station location. In order to define the best frequency band to perform the similarity
search we tried using all the combinations between [0.1,0.5,1.0,2.0] Hz as minimum
frequencies and [7,8,9,10,12,15] Hz as maximum frequencies for a four corners bandpass
filter. The combination that produced the highest amount of templates for the day
before, the day, and the day after the three big events was selected to perform the
template matching. Such frequency band is 2 to 7 Hz. All waveforms presented herein
are bandpassed in the way described above. Also, in order to ensure proper detections
of events that occurred near midnight, daily continuous data was loaded including 5
minutes from the day before and 20 minutes from the day after.
Templates were built from the preliminary catalog starting in 2016 and those within
the spatial confining function shown in Figure [?] as dashed lines. Thus, our starting
catalog consists of 1830 earthquakes. In order to build templates from these events
the following requirements had to be met by an event. a. The signal to noise ratio
calculated using 4 seconds before and 4 seconds after body wave arrivals is higher than
3. (P wave in Z channels, S waves in horizontal channels). b. At least nine channels
meet the requirement in (a).
The procedure lead to 822 templates. The workflow explained was repeated for each
day using the 822 templates. A first example is shown in Figure 5, the horizontal scale
is the hour of the day. Green vertical dashed lines show the events in the RSNC catalog
(their origin times). Those green lines with an inverted red triangle above indicate
events that met the criteria to build a template out of them. Finally, the blue dots
show all the detections made for all of the templates for July 7, 2018. It is notable

11
Figure 4: (Top) Daily Stacked Cross Correlation Function for template ID
20180707005735. The threshold is shown as the red dashed line. The horizontal scale
corresponds to the hour of the day. Notice the self detection minutes before 1 am.
(Bottom) Relative position of template waveforms (blue) with respect to continuous
data (gray) for the detection corresponding to the peak of SCC at 14:26 pm in the top
plot. see Appendix A for station location.

12
Figure 5: Result detections for July 7, 2018. Cataloged events in green, those that
served as templates are indicated with the red triangles. All detections before post
processing are shown as blue dots.

how in this particular day how all the events in catalog are detected and taht all the
templates are perfectly self detected. Given that many templates produce detections at
the same time, one of them must be selected for further analysis. Thus, in a 5 seconds
window the detections with the highest SCC is selected. Analog results for the days of
the big events are shown in Appendix B.
A practical way to visualize the new detections is by looking directly at the seismo-
grams and its envelopes. An example is showin in Figure 6. 5 hours of the seismogram
at broadband station PRA in the vertical component are shown. Cataloged events are
highlighted by the green bands whereas new events are indicated by the blue dashed
lines. The seismogram is clipped at really small scales to show how small the events
are. Notice that some of the events go outside of the shown box. Consider that earlier
during this particular day a Ml 4.5 occurred near Nevado del Huila Volcano. This day
is an appropriate way of showing the performance of template matching because events
occurring during this day are highly similar. The maximum amplitude value in this
station is around 300000 counts, so what is being shown is 3 orders of magnitude below.
THe envelope of the signal is shown as well indicating the same events. Notice how the
backgorund noise has periods of increased amplitudes and is sustaind for periods longer
than one hour. This signal is probably volcanic tremor given the event in the morning.
The point of tremor will be further analyzed later in the text.
Overall, the template matching yielded 2526 new detections in 1010 days of continu-
ous data. This results are shown in Figure 7. The comparison between the preliminary
catalog, the template matching catalog and the combined catalog is shown. The total
cumulative number of events is 4356. The dates in which the big events are indicated
with yellow stars and vertical yellow dashed lines. Aguilar & Prieto in their 2018 work
showed a sustained increase in the rate of seismicity from 2016 to 2018 after declustering
the catalog. The effect is observed in the combined catalog, event though the author
has not quantified it yet. Another interesting fact is the difference in the duration of

13
Figure 6: Seismograms and envelopes of five hours at station PRA during July 7, 2018.
Catalog events are indicated in green and the new detections in blue. See text for
details.

the Aftershock Sequences (AS), it is observed as the deviation from the linear behavior
of the cumulative number of earthquakes. For the 2016 event, the AS lasted for a few
weeks whereas for the 2017 event it lasted for around 4 months. For the 2018 event it
seems that the triggered seismicity starts even before the event itself. That is a false
pattern. The burst of activity actually corresponds to the AS of the Nevado del huila
event mentioned before. By looking closely it is observed that the AS of the 2018 in
reality lasted for about 3 weeks. The difference in AS behavior might be a consequence
of the exact location of the event in the fault system, its focal mechanism or other of
the static or dynamic parameteres of the events. Of particular interest is now to look
at stress drops, radiated energy or rupture velocity.
The amount of new detections compared to the starting catalog is not even twice as
many, which is a low detection number compared to other studies performing similarity
searches. The number of detections usually is around ten times as many as in the
starting catalog as shown by studies in the NIcoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, the San
Andreas Fault or the Alpine Faut in New Zealand.

14
Figure 7: Comparison of the preliminary catalog, the new template matching detections
and the combined catalog.

15
5 Repeating seismicity
During the template matching it is possible to spot highly similar earthquakes, as they
detect each other with a really high SCC, tipically above 0.8. We found 9 families
with four or more events, 6 of them around the burst of activity related to Nevado del
Huila Volcano. In addition, 78 events are candidates to be repeating pairs or triplets.
One triplet is shown in Figure 8. This particular triplet shows an increase in the inter-
event period along with an increase in magnitude. This might suggest that really close
patches of the same fault are sliding in a way that each event releases stress but as
the inter-event time increases, so does the accumulated stress leading to bigger events.
Waveforms are shown after P wave cross correlation realignment.

Figure 8: Repeating triplet. Time and magnitude evolutions are indicated

One of the most appealing repeating pairs in shown in Figure 8, waveforms are shown
along with their corresponding CC values. This particular repeating pair occurred at
coordinates 3.48 N, -73.46. Notice how the waveforms are almost the same at station
CHI whereas at station ORTC they look they have the same shape but the bottom
waveform looks compressed. It might indicate that the source process of the two events
towards CHI is almost the same, while towards ORTC the difference in the process
resides in the speed at which it occurred.

Figure 9: Best repeating pair in the search. See Figure 3 for station location.

16
6 Earthquake Energy
When comparing the EGF approach none of the smaller events served as appropriate
EGF for the three largest events, indicating that this earthquakes are dissimilar in their
source mechanism Calculations of power spectral density using mtspec [4] and [11]
Once the spectra has been calculated for each station the spectra was corrected
following the approach presented by Ide et al.,2003:
R f M0 −πf t
|u̇(f )| = 3
q e Q (4)
2ρv r 1 + (f /fc )4

where R accounts for the focal mechanism, ρ and v are the density and the speed of
seismic waves in the hypocentral region respectively.r is the source to receiver distance.
The second part of the equation accounts for the source spectrum, f is the frequency,
M0 is the seismic moment and fc is the corner frequency. The last part of the equation
is the anelastic attenuation term, where t is the source-receiver traveltime and Q is the
quality factor. The values of these parameters where taken from the velocity model
used by RSNC, except from Q, taken from Vargas,2006.
Aguilar & Prieto in their 2018 work showed that for both events in October 2016
and for the one in February 2017 the highest radiated energies are to the SW, regardless
of the focal mechanism. The spectra were calculated using a sine multitaper method
[4], [11].

7 Brief Discussion
The geometry of the seismogenic zone has been better illuminated by our relocations,
its dip is clearly to the NW, opposing that proposed by [16] and [17]. This seismological
evidence has to be integrated to other data sets such as geological evidence so as to
validate its veracity. ON the other hand, one has to acknowledge that as we used the
general velocity model of RSNC, it is not a very detailed representation of the velocity
structure and it might hamper our results from being accurate. New relocation schemes
and procedures will be used in the near future by the author. Also, the analyst picks
used in this study are those by the employees of RSNC, their quality was not assessed.
As a consequence, this is another factor that adds to the uncertainties in our relocations.
When the author gets the time and the expertise, a hollistic work will be approached
again. It will include pick adjustment, the use of a different initial locator and the
derivation of a local velocity model.
The concentration of seismicity shown by the relocation suggests that the fault step
between the Altamira and Nazareth is acting as a mechanical barrier that serves as a
stress accumulator that has led to the bigger events in the last few years. Also, this
barrier could be preventing the nucleation of larger events, as a rupture would not be
able to jump from one fault to the other.

17
 This works provides an advancement in the knowledge of this seismogenic zone,
however this is a rather primitive earthquake detection scheme as it relies on a priori
knowledge of source and what earhtquakes look like. Some modifications that might
improve the results are adaptions to the matched filter as those implemented by Beauce
et al.,2017 [10] and Frank & Abercrombie, 2018 [9]. Creating a weighting scheme for
station in the cross correlation stacking, thus avoiding periods of low quality data. On
the other hand the adaptive template length as it accounts for the duration of the source
and prevents the cross correlation calculations from being biased because of templates
containing more noise than signal. Another of the factors that negatively impact the
efficacy of our detector is the aperture of the network itself, stations are too far away
from each other to allow the detection of really small events. As observed in Appendix
B some events that were already in the catalog and that did not meet the criteria to
become templates are missed during the template matching. The next step is to use a
more generalized detector such as subspace detection[3] or Fingerprint and Similarity
Thresholding (FAST) [13],[14]. Other detectors based on neuronal networks might not
be a good fit for our network given that the V’s are not properly met, as there is no
such a volume of data nor velocity or veracity.
A matter of future work relates to the existence of tremor in the AFS. Future
densification of the seismological network will provide the capability to detect events
whose seismic radiation is low and taht are small in magnitude.

8 Not the Conclusions

We provide new insights in to the geometry of the Algeciras Fault System, focusing on
its northern termination. The Altamira and Nazareth faults dip to the NW, contrary to
that proposed by other authors. We found 2526 new earthquakes and isolated repeating
families, triplets and pairs. This results do not correspond to the ground truth as we
have discussed the sources of uncertainty and the factors that hamper our results from
being perfect. The cause for the difference in Aftershock Sequence behavior remains for
studies in the near future. This work, however, is the gateway to the study of repeating
seismicity, earthquake directivity and earthquake detection including its seismotectonic
implications in one of the areas with the highest seismogenic potential in Colombia,
specially where it poses a particularly elevated risk.
There is a lot to do.

18
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my parents for their support.
Thanks to Germán Prieto for his patience along these years.
Thanks to Marine Denolle for supporting my academic growth.
Thanks to all those who shared their time with me during these years.
Thanks to the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology -IRIS- and the Na-
tional Science Foundation -NSF- for giving me the opportunity to boost my research
skills at Harvard University. The computations in this work were run on the Odyssey
cluster supported by the FAS Division of Science, Research Computing Group at Har-
vard University.
Thanks and Thanks again.

19
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[17] C Dimaté et al., Seismotectonique des Cordilleres Centrale et Orientale Colombi-

ennes. PhD Thesis. Université Louis Pasteur – Strasbourg. 2003.

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Appendix

Figure 10 shows RSNC station locations.

Figure 11 shows the template matching results for the days in which the big events
occurred.

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Figure 10: Map of stations of RSNC. See the text for detail on the statinos that were
used on the template matching.

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Figure 11: Detection results for the days in which the bigger events occurred. Notice
in the bottom plot how some events already in the catalog are missed by the template
matching.

24