We found that repeated slow slip events observed on the deeper interface of the northern Cascadia subduction zone, which were at first thought to be silent, have unique nonearthquake seismic signatures. Tremorlike seismic signals were found to correlate temporally and spatially with slip events identified from crustal motion data spanning the past 6 years. During the period between slips, tremor activity is minor or nonexistent. We call this associated tremor and slip phenomenon episodic tremor and slip (ETS) and propose that ETS activity can be used as a real-time indicator of stress loading of the Cascadia megathrust earthquake zone.

Continuous Global Positioning System sites in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, and northwestern Washington state, USA, have been moving landward as a result of the locked state of the Cascadia subduction fault offshore. In the summer of 1999, a cluster of seven sites briefly reversed their direction of motion. No seismicity was associated with this event. The sudden displacements are best explained by approximately 2 centimeters of aseismic slip over a 50-kilometer-by-300-kilometer area on the subduction interface downdip from the seismogenic zone, a rupture equivalent to an earthquake of moment magnitude 6.7. This provides evidence that slip of the hotter, plastic part of the subduction interface, and hence stress loading of the megathrust earthquake zone, can occur in discrete pulses.

The Cascadia subduction zone is thought to be capable of generating major earthquakes with moment magnitude as large as M(w) = 9 at an interval of several hundred years. The seismogenic portion of the plate interface is mostly offshore and is currently locked, as inferred from geodetic data. However, episodic surface displacements-in the direction opposite to the long-term deformation motions caused by relative plate convergence across a locked interface-are observed about every 14 months with an unusual tremor-like seismic signature. Here we show that these tremors are distributed over a depth range exceeding 40 km within a limited horizontal band. Many occurred within or close to the strong seismic reflectors above the plate interface where local earthquakes are absent, suggesting that the seismogenic process for tremors is fluid-related. The observed depth range implies that tremors could be associated with the variation of stress field induced by a transient slip along the deeper portion of the Cascadia interface or, alternatively, that episodic slip is more diffuse than originally suggested.

Slip events with an average duration of about 10 days and effective total slip displacements of severalc entimetres have been detected on the deeper (25 to 45 km) part of the northern Cascadia subduction zone interface by observing transient surface deformation on a network of continuously recording Global Positioning System (GPS) sites. The slip events occur down-dip from the currently locked, seismogenic portion of the subduction zone, and, for the geographic region around Victoria, British Columbia, repeat at 13 to 16 month intervals. These episodes of slip are accompanied by distinct, low-frequency tremors, similar to those reported in the forearc region of southern Japan. Although the processes which generate this phenomenon of episodic tremor and slip (ETS) are not well understood, it is possible that the ETS zone may constrain the landward extent of megathrust rupture, and conceivable that an ETS event could precede the next great thrust earthquake.

[1] We study in detail the two consecutive episodic tremor-and-slip (ETS) events that occurred in the northern Cascadia subduction zone during 2003 and 2004. For both sequences, the newly developed Source-Scanning Algorithm (SSA) is applied to seismic waveform data from a dense regional seismograph array to determine the precise locations and origin times of seismic tremors. In map view, the majority of the tremors occurred in a limited band bounded approximately by the surface projections of the 30-km and 50-km depth contours of the plate interface. The horizontal migration of tremor occurrence is from southeast to northwest with an average speed of 5 km/d. In cross section, tremors in both sequences span a depth range of over 40 km across the interface, with the majority occurring in the overriding continental crust. In particular, 50-55% of them are located within 2.5 km from the strong seismic reflector bands above the plate interface. The lack of vertical migration implies that a slow diffusion process in the vertical direction cannot be responsible for tremor occurrences. The source spectra of tremors clearly lack high-frequency content (>5 Hz) relative to local earthquakes. We propose two possible models to explain the relationship between slip and tremors. The first one regards ETS tremors as the manifestation of hydroseismogenic processes in response to the temporal strain variation associated with the episodic slip along the lower portion of the plate interface downdip from the locked zone. In the second model, tremors and slip are associated with the same process along the same structure in a distributed deformation zone across the plate interface. Neither model can be dismissed conclusively at this stage.