Utah earthquake swarms shed light on western earthquakes

Most of the earthquakes that rock beneath the Great Western Basin come in storm waves, bunched together in time and space. Scientists call these seismic groups “swarms,” a category distinct from the many aftershocks that follow a large tremor, such as the 2020 magnitude 5.7 Magna earthquake on the Wasatch fault.

Instead of spreading evenly over time, many of these small, often imperceptible earthquakes strike an area in a short period of time, say a few days or weeks.

Central Utah has been the scene of dozens of earthquake swarms that have been recorded over the past 40 years by an ever-expanding network of seismic arrays operated by the University of Utah.

Seismologists are now analyzing decades of seismic data in hopes of figuring out the significance of these swarms in a geologically complex region known as the Earth’s hotspot and – in geological terms – for young volcanoes.

“In central Utah, seismic swarms are more common than any other type of sequence. We’ve looked at all kinds of sequences, but 80% of the sequences are swarms. That’s amazing,” said Postdoctoral Research Fellow Geza Petersen. “We’ve also seen that these elements are very heterogeneous. So one site in central Utah can have very, very different behavior than others just 30, 40, 50 kilometers away.”

With US geology professor Christine Pankoff, Petersen published the latest findings July 13 in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems. Funding came from the State of Utah and a $220 million Department of Energy grant to support a geothermal research plant in U known as Utah Forge.

Geothermal hot spot

FORGE is located outside Milford, within a research area that spans Beaver, Iron, Sevier, and Paiute counties. The research area is home to three geothermal power plants and includes the cities of Circleville, Beaver and Richfield.

Researchers believe that earthquakes are caused by hot water, powered by geothermal activity, pouring through cracks in the Earth’s crust.

During the past 40 years, U of U Seismograph stations have detected seismic sequences featuring earthquakes of magnitude 1.5 or greater. But on further examination of the data, Peterson and Banquo were able to identify hundreds of additional, smaller, 0.5-magnitude earthquakes recorded in 50 distinct sequences.

They conclude that 40 qualifies as squadrons. A lot can be learned from these small earthquakes, but they’re hard to study, according to Panko, associate director of Seismograph Stations.

(BRT) and Cove Fort (CVT) cross-sectional areas (PD Rowley, 1998), thin black lines indicate quadrilateral faults. MP: Volcanic field of the Markagont Plateau. The larger map (c) shows the seismicity of the study area since 1981, ML 2.5 (UUSS).

“We’re all worried about the Wasatch Front, but the other thing to know is we’ve got earthquakes all over Utah,” Pankoff said. “We’ve recorded a certain level, but in some of these places there are probably earthquakes that happen all the time that we don’t see. That’s a really important thing to understand.”

Thousands of earthquakes

All told, the research analyzed 2,300 earthquakes, most of which were between 1 and 3 on the Richter scale, the largest of which was a magnitude 5.1 that struck east of Richfield in 1989. This quake wasn’t part of a swarm, but was a mainshock followed by several aftershocks. The full catalog of the study area contains 20,000 events between 1981 and 2023, according to Petersen.

“However, we cannot determine exactly how many of them are part of a sequence because we limit the study of sequences that contain at least 20 earthquakes within 10 days. We do not look at smaller sequences because we need a lower bound to look at the statistical parameters and compare the characteristic patterns of the sequences,” she said. “However, in the 1980s and 1990s, the earthquake network in Utah was not as dense as it is today. There were far fewer stations. So we can only study larger sequences with larger magnitudes than these times. There are likely many more seismic swarms or sequences.”

The study greatly expands on another recent study that focused exclusively on a swarm of hundreds of small earthquakes around Milford in the spring of 2021. This area did not see much seismic activity during the seismograph’s 40-year data window. Meanwhile, Petersen said, earthquakes were occurring more frequently every few months in the nearby mineral mountains to the west during the same time period.

“So it’s a very heterogeneous system,” she said. “You have a group of earthquakes in the same place and you can start to learn about the structures that are activating in place. If you only have one earthquake, you can’t learn that much.”

Swarms of metallic mountains were first discovered a few years ago when new seismometers were installed for the FORGE geothermal research project.

“Before we didn’t have the decision, but now we can see that there are always events coming up, and that’s fast,” Petersen said. “Within a couple of hours, you suddenly have 30, 40, 50 events and then it stops again. You have this over and over again, you have so much activity. You can’t really feel it. It’s so small for that, but we can see it on the seismometers.”

The paper, “Small-Scale Seismic Swarms in Central Utah (USA): Interactions of Regional Tectonics, Local Structures, and Hydrothermal Systems” can be found here.

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