Russian scientists have created the most complete and representative catalog of earthquakes in the Arctic with a uniform magnitude scale. It contains data on almost 46,000 events that occurred between 1962 and 2022. The result of the work of the scientific teams of the Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Earthquake Prediction Theory and Mathematical Geophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences will allow to assess the seismic hazard and risks for this region in the long term.
To study the seismic regime and assess the seismic hazard, a representative catalog of earthquakes in the studied region is needed. However, due to different configurations of monitoring networks and record processing methods, seismic agencies may not register some earthquakes recorded by their colleagues from other agencies. Thus, the most complete information about all the earthquakes that have occurred can only be obtained by combining several databases from reliable sources.
To create an integrated catalog of earthquakes in the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation, the authors of the work have specially created a technique that allows you to identify and remove duplicates formed when combining. The peculiarity of the created mathematical method is that it makes it possible to separate the resulting duplicates and aftershocks with a high level of reliability. This is quite a difficult task, since both events are close in space and time.
When creating the combined catalog, the territory of the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation was divided into three parts: the Eastern Sector, the Western Sector, as well as the Gakkel and Knipovich Ridges, and the Svalbard archipelago. Each of them was considered separately.
Map of earthquake epicenters of the combined earthquake catalog of the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation (including the Gakkel and Knipovich Ridges, as well as the Svalbard Archipelago) for the 1962-2022 period. Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences
“The combined earthquake catalog of the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation will allow to obtain local estimates of the coefficients of the law of recurrence and the parameter of the law of productivity of earthquakes. These estimates will determine regionally the repeatability of events of different strengths, the balance between the number of large and small events, and the fractal dimension of the seismicity carrier. All this will make it possible to carry out seismic hazard and risk assessments for a long time ahead, taking into account both possible economic losses and the costs of measures to prevent them," said Peter Shebalin, head of the “Seismic Hazard” project, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The created earthquake catalog of the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation is a combination of earthquake data from the regional catalogs of the Unified Geophysical Service of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Yakutia, North-East of Russia, Kamchatka, the Arctic, the East European Craton, and Svalbard), the regional catalog of the seismic network of the Federal Center for Integrated Arctic Research of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the regional catalog of the western sector of the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation, and data from the International Seismological Centre.
The catalog contains information on 45,793 seismic events for the 1962-2022 period. It is published freely on the website of the World Data Center for Solid Earth Physics, as well as in the journal Applied Sciences.
The research was supported by a grant under the Presidential Program of the Russian Science Foundation.