First feasibility demonstration of GNSS-seismology for anthropogenic earthquakes detection

Abstract

High-rate GNSS has been proven effective in characterising waveforms and co-seismic displacements due to medium-to-strong natural earthquakes. No application focused on small magnitude events like shallow anthropogenic earthquakes, where displacements and noise have the same order of magnitude. We propose a procedure based on proper signal detection and filtering of the position and velocity time series obtained from high-rate (10 Hz) GNSS data processing with two intrinsically different approaches (Precise Point Positioning and variometry). We tested it on five mining tremors with magnitudes of 3.4–4.0, looking both at event detection and its kinematic characterisation. Here we show a high agreement, at the level of 1 s, between GNSS and seismic solutions for the earthquake first epoch detection. Also, we show that high-rate multi-constellation (GPS + Galileo) GNSS can reliably characterise low-magnitude shallow earthquakes in terms of induced displacements and velocities, and, including their peak values, respectively, at the level of very few millimetres and 1–2 cm/s, paving the way to the routine use of GNSS-seismology for monitoring human activities prone to cause small earthquakes and related potential damages.