A rare “Boomerang” earthquake is observed along the Atlantic fault line

Scientists have tracked a Boomerang earthquake in the ocean for the first time, providing clues about how they could wreak havoc on Earth.

Earthquakes occur when rocks suddenly break over a fault – the boundary between two blocks or plates. During large earthquakes, rock fracture can propagate down the fault line. Now, an international team of researchers has recorded a Boomerang earthquake, in which the rupture initially spreads away from the initial outage, then turns and back in the other direction at higher speeds.

The strength and duration of the rupture along the fault affects the earth’s vibration at the surface, which can lead to building damage or tsunami waves. Ultimately, knowing the mechanisms of how faults rupture and the physics involved will help researchers make better models and predictions of future earthquakes, and could inform early warning systems for earthquakes.

The team, led by scientists from the University of Southampton and Imperial College London, announced their results today in Nature Geoscience.

While large earthquakes (magnitudes of 7 or higher) occur on the ground and are measured by nearby observation networks (seismometers), these earthquakes often trigger movement along complex networks of faults, such as a series of dominoes. This makes it difficult to track the basic mechanisms of how this “seismic slip” occurred.

Under the ocean, many types of faults have simple shapes, thus providing the possibility of falling under the hood of an “earthquake”. However, it is a far cry from the large networks of seismometers on Earth. The team used a new network of underwater seismometers to monitor the Romansh fracture zone, a fault line that extends 900 kilometers under the Atlantic Ocean near the equator.

In 2016, they recorded a magnitude 7.1 earthquake along the Romansh fault zone and tracked the rupture along the fault. This revealed that the rupture initially traveled in one direction before turning in the middle of the earthquake and breaking the “ sound-seismic barrier, ” becoming a very high-speed earthquake.

Only a few of these earthquakes have been recorded globally. The team believed that the first stage of the rupture was critical to causing the second stage to slip velocity.

First author Dr Stephen Hicks, of Imperial’s Department of Geosciences and Engineering, said: “While scientists have found that this reverse-rupture mechanism is possible from theoretical models, our new study provides some of the clearest evidence of this mysterious mechanism that occurs in true error.

“Although the fault structure appears simple, the way the earthquake grew was not, and this was completely different to the way we expected the earthquake to look before we started analyzing the data.”

However, the team says that if similar types of reverse or backlash earthquakes occur on the ground, the seismic rupture that shifts midway through the earthquake could significantly affect the amount of ground shaking produced.

Due to the lack of observational evidence before now, this mechanism has not been accounted for in earthquake scenario modeling and risk assessments of such earthquakes. Detailed tracking of the Boomerang earthquake could allow researchers to find similar patterns in other earthquakes, add new scenarios to their modeling, and improve earthquake impact predictions.

The ocean floor seismograph network was part of the PI-LAB and EUROLAB projects, a million dollar experiment funded by the Natural Environment Research Council in the United Kingdom, the European Research Council and the National Science Foundation in the United States.

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