Namazu Project

ANR-11-JAPN-006

The great Tohoku earthquake is the best ever recorded seismic event worldwide. The availability of proximal dense high quality seismic and GPS data will help us to improve our knowledge about earthquakes in general and about their consequences.

Within our project, we propose to perform a massive analysis of this unique dataset of continuous seismic waveforms recorded by both F-NET and HI-NET networks and spanning the time of the great Tohoku earthquake. Our objective will be to measure continuous seismic velocity changes over all Japan before, during, and after the Tohoku earthquake and to compare these measurements with crustal deformation inferred from GPS, InSAR and numerical models.

More precisely, we will be interested in the possible relation between the March 9, M7.2 and the March 11, M9 earthquakes that occurred in the same area. We will also study into detail the Earth’s crust response to the dynamic and static stress-strain changes induced by the M9 earthquake and try to assess how these changes could affect seismicity over Japan in the future.

Namazu Workshop near Grenoble on November 9, 2012