2006 Volume 59 Issue 1 Pages 29-37
We investigated changes in the depth distribution of aftershocks of three large inland earthquakes in Japan, the 2000 western Tottori Prefecture Earthquake of M 7.3, the 2003 northern Miyagi Prefecture earthquake of M 6.4, and the 2004 mid Niigata Prefecture earthquake of M 6.8. For all of them we found that the seismogenic layer extended to the deeper and shallower zones after occurrence of the main shock. The shallow and deep activities decayed faster than the activity in the intermediate depth. This suggests that when stress is built up very fast, brittle fractures can occur in the zone where increase of stress is usually relaxed through a ductile process. Our results also show that a fault motion could extend to the outside of the seismogenic zone estimated from the background seismicity, which should be taken into consideration in the hazard assessment.
