This project involves studies of global and regional seismicity. Central to the project is a continuation of the Global Centroid-Moment-Tensor (CMT) Project, which now represents a 25-year-long effort to analyze global earthquake activity and to maintain a comprehensive and authoritative catalog of earthquake focal mechanisms, the Global CMT Catalog. In addition to the systematic analysis of earthquakes and dissemination of earthquake information, the research also includes the development of a dynamic earthquake moment-tensor database. The new catalog will be searchable on the web, and will include auxiliary data, such as information about the seismograms and Earth model used in the analysis, the quality of the solution, and any history of updates to the results.
A second component of the project is an examination of previously undetected earthquakes. Each year, more than 100 earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 4.7 that are not present in standard earthquake catalogs are detected using a new detection algorithm based on systematic monitoring of the Earth's long-period wavefield.
The largest group of these newly detected events includes events occurring along the Earth's ridge-transform fault system, and the nature of these events will be investigated to explain their earlier non-detection. A second class of events to be investigated is associated with gravitational sliding and includes landsliding events in Alaska and other regions of high topographic relief, glacial earthquakes along the coast of Greenland, and potentially several events on the continental slope of North and South America.
