[S05-P] Poster

[S05-P-04] Source parameters of the 1952 Pyeongyang, North Korea, earthquake

^○Tae-Seob Kang¹, Myung-Soon Jun² (1.Pukyong National University, Busan, Republic of Korea, 2.Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources, Daejeon, Republic of Korea)

There was a rather large felt earthquake on March 19, 1952 from Nampo City, west of Pyeongyang, the capital of North Korea. The North Korea Seismological Institute estimated the magnitude of the event around 6.5 (Seismological Institute of North Korea, 1987). They might estimate the magnitude from traditional method, i.e. felt area survey since there was no seismic station in the Korean Peninsula at that time. Furthermore it was during the Korean War. Considering the low to moderate seismicity around the Korean Peninsula, the 1952 North Korean event is exceptional and may be the largest event since the 20th century. For this event, we collected eight seismogram copies from Japan, China, and Russia. However many seismograms show very weak traces. We could digitize rather good quality data only from three stations, Abuyama and Matsushiro in Japan and Sverdlovsk in Russia. To determine the earthquake source parameters, we applied moment tensor grid searching method and compare the observed and synthetic seismograms for the above three station data. We found the best fitting with strike 120 degrees, dip 90 degrees, rake 340 degrees, and seismic moment 2.45*10^25 dyne-cm, which is relevant with moment magnitude (Mw) 6.17.