A temporary observation of microearthquakes was carried out at Karumai, Iwate Prefecture (40°19′N, 141°32′E) after the occurrence of the Tokachi-oki Earthquake of May 16, 1968. It was made for about 100 days since 22 o'clock on May 18, about 60 hours later than the occurrence of main shock. Total number of observed earthquakes is as many as 52, 000. Most of them were, of course, the aftershocks in usual sense and their hypocenters were located within the aftershock area, of which the areal size is approximately accordant with the Utsu-Seki's law.
Besides these normal aftershocks, however, an activity of microearthquakes with the S-P times less than 5 seconds at the station was clearly observed. These earthquakes, which are evidently located outside of the aftershock area, are the main concern of the present paper. The following natures of these events are found:
a) The time distribution of these events is similar to the normal aftershock activity, and the number of shocks decreases in accordance with the hyperbolic law.
b) The activity for these events is far lower than that of the aftershocks.
c) The region of activity is estimated to lie on the northern part of Morioka-Shirakawa tectonic line, which is about 100km distant from the western boundary of the aftershock area.
A similar phenomenon was reported by KURIHARA and HIKAWA (1968) to occur at the Tokachi-dake Volcano in Hokkaido, although the volcano is far from the aftershock area. A small activity in the northern part of Iwate Prefecture was found at the time of the great Sanriku Earthquake, 1933. This region may be near the place of the present activity. At the time of the Nankaido-oki Earthquake of 1946, activities in the middle part of Kyushu and in Kyoto were also reported. It should be noted that these activities apparently accompanied the great earthquakes and that the excited regions were on the tectonic lines.
From these facts, it is concluded that the effect of a big earthquake is not limited within the so-called aftershock area but the occurrence of big shock sometimes causes the activity in the region far distant from it. It may be reasonable to consider that the microearthquake activity in the present case was resulted by the relative deformation of two crustal blocks of Kitakami mountaineous land and western area, Morioka-Shirakawa line being the boundary of the two blocks.
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