Searching for slow-slip events at the Sumatran subduction zone

American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, 9-13 December 2013, San Francisco
Slow-slip events were first discovered on the deeper Cascadia subduction interface about a decade ago. Since then, slow-slip events have been observed at various subduction environments including Cascadia, Nankai, Alaska, New Zealand, Mexico, and Costa Rica. Conspicuously absent from this list, however, is the Sumatran subduction zone, along which no slow-slip events have yet been discovered. As one of the most active subduction zones currently in the world, the Sumatran subduction zone has experienced a series of great earthquakes over the last decade, along with numerous moderate and smaller earthquakes. We conducted a systematic search for transient aseismic slip in time series from the Sumatran GPS Array (SuGAr) between 2002 and 2012. We reprocessed the time series using GIPSY 6.2, and included the most up-to-date atmosphere and ocean models in processing to reduce day-to-day scatter of the raw time series. The raw data are dominated signals from coseismic and postseismic deformation. In order to search for much smaller transient signals, on the order of a few millimeters, we estimated and removed long-term background rates simultaneously with a large number of earthquake parameters, thus generating daily residuals. After our careful inspection of the daily residuals, we concluded that no episodic slip events have been recorded. Regarding non-episodic slip events, one station (BSAT) recorded a rate change in a few months immediately after the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake. Some other nearby stations that were installed later recorded a portion of this change. However, there were no other independent observations to confirm if this signal was indeed slow-slip. Except this suspicious signal, no other positive evidence could provide support for the occurrence of slow-slip events in Sumatra. This may indicate that slow-slip events have not occurred on the Sunda megathrust over the last decade, but may also highlight the limitation of the SuGAr network to detect slow-slip events. In testing the capability of the SuGAr network to resolve slow-slip events along the Sumatran subduction interface similar to those observed at Cascadia (~Mw 6.7) and Nankai (~Mw 6.0), we show that the current SuGAr network cannot fully resolve slow-slip events in the deeper part. This information is useful for augmenting and strengthening the network in the future