[M-IS08] Interdisciplinary studies on pre-earthquake processes

[MIS08-09] Spatiotemporal Distribution Characteristics of Conductivity Anomalies before Ms > 6 Earthquakes in the North-South Seismic Belt of China during 2014 – 2019

*Zhiqiang Mao¹, Chieh-Hung Chen¹, Suqin Zhang², Qi Li², Aisa Yisimayili³ (1.China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), 2.Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration, 3.Earthquake Agency of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region)

Keywords:Seismo-conductivity anomalies, Parkinson vector , Geomagnetic, The North-South Seismic Belt of China

The North-South Seismic Belt of China is one of the most active seismic areas on the Chinese continent. More than ten strong earthquakes (Ms > 6) have occurred in this region since 2010. However, Earthquake-related conductivity anomalies are rarely reported for those earthquakes. In this study, 3-component geomagnetic data recorded at sixty geomagnetic stations are selected to compute the Parkinson vectors to monitor the changes of conductivity before and after the earthquakes. Considering most fluxgate magnetometer have only been installed since 2014, we concentrate on six Ms > 6 earthquakes occurred during 2014–2019. To mitigate artificial disturbances, low noise data during the 00:00 – 5:00 LT are utilized. We compute the background distribution and monitoring distribution using the azimuth of the Parkinson vectors at each station within six years (2014 – 2019) and a 15-day moving window, respectively. The background distribution is subtracted from the monitoring distributions to mitigate the influences of underlying inhomogeneous tectonic structures. The obtained difference distributions binned by 10° within 400 km from each station are superimposed during 60 days before and after the earthquake to construct integrated maps. To analyze the potential frequency characteristics, we compute the results form low to high frequency band. The results show that for four earthquakes, the conductivity anomalies areas appear near the epicenter 10 to 20 days before earthquakes, while the rest two earthquakes have no anomaly. The conductivity anomalies appear at all study frequency band from 0.0005 Hz to 0.1 Hz, and significantly at 0.001 – 0.005 Hz before earthquakes. Meanwhile, we find that the lower frequency band corresponds to larger anomalies area. These results suggest the change of underlying conductivity near the hypocenter is a possible phenomena for strong earthquakes, and the frequency characteristics of the seismo-conductivity anomaly during the earthquake are helpful to understand the pre-earthquake anomalous phenomena.