LETTER

Earth Planets Space, 63, 955–959, 2011

Rupture process and coseismic deformations of the 27 February 2010
Maule earthquake, Chile
Nelson Pulido1 , Yuji Yagi2 , Hiroyuki Kumagai1 , and Naoki Nishimura2
1 National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, 3-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0006, Japan
2 University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8572, Japan(Received January 7, 2011; Revised April 26, 2011; Accepted April 26, 2011; Online published December 29, 2011)

We estimated the spatial and temporal slip distribution for the 27 February 2010 Maule earthquake fromteleseismic body wave data. To obtain a stable inversion solution, we used the data covariance matrix fromthe observation and modeling errors, incorporated smoothing constraints and determined their optimal values byusing the Akaike Bayesian Information Criterion (ABIC). The fault rupture can be divided into three stages.
For the first 30 s the rupture started as an elliptical crack elongated in the in-plane direction along the dip.
After 30 s the rupture propagated bi-laterally along strike reaching the maximum moment release rate at around50 s near the hypocenter. Finally the rupture propagated mainly to the north reaching another peak of moment
release rate at 80 s and 130 km north-east from the hypocenter. Main rupture lasted for about 110 s. In order toevaluate our source model, we calculated the predicted coseismic vertical displacements and compare them withobserved uplift/subsidence values measured along the coastline, as well as displacements obtained from strong
ground motion and high-sampling GPS records in Concepción. Our model provides good estimations of the static
displacements in the northern source region, but under-estimates the coseismic uplifts in the southern region.
Key words: 2010 Chile earthquake, source process, permanent displacement, strong motion.

1.

Introduction

On 27 February 2010, central Chile was heavely hit
by a mega-earthquake (Mw 8.8, 06:34:14 UTC, 72.733W,
35.909S; USGS, 2010), causing extensive damage in
Concepción and Santiago cities. This event, the sixth
largest earthquake in instrumental history, was located in
the Meridional Andes beneath the South American plate,where the Nazca plate converges at a rate of 6.5 cm/year.
This earthquake filled well studied seismic gap between
the 1960 Great Valdivia earthquake (Mw 9.5) and the1985 Valparaiso earthquake (Ms 7.8) (Barrientos and Ward,
1990; Ruegg et al., 2009; Fig. 1). Interseismic strain accumulation measurements indicated that the ConcepciónConstitución area was a mature seismic gap (Campos et al.,
2002; Ruegg et al., 2009), which overlaps the rupture areaof the great 1835 earthquake. In this study we investigate
the rupture process of the Maule earthquake based on an inversion of teleseismic body waves recorded by the Global
Seismic Network. We use the new inversion approach of
Yagi and Fukahata (2011), in which correlated errors originated from uncertainty of Green’s functions are incorporated to reduce the bias of inversion results. Then, using
our source model we calculate the vertical deformations
and compare them with uplift/subsidence values measured
along the coast from the Arauco Peninsula to Viña del Mar
covering the entire source area (Farı́as et al., 2010). The
c The Society of Geomagnetism and Earth, Planetary and Space SciCopyright ences (SGEPSS); The Seismological Society of Japan; The Volcanological Societyof Japan; The Geodetic Society of Japan; The Japanese Society for Planetary Sciences; TERRAPUB.

doi:10.5047/eps.2011.04.008

observed deformations along the coast clearly indicated thehinge line along the fault strike where seaward uplift turns
into landward subsidence. We use these data to evaluate
the slip distribution of the Maule earthquake estimated fromthe seismic inversion. We also calculate the static displacement at Concepción from our source model, and compare
it with the ones obtained from strong ground motion andhigh-sampling GPS records at this city.

2.

Data

We retrieved teleseismic body-wave data (38 P waves)with a good azimuthal coverage from the IRIS-DMC web
site (http://www.iris.edu). These teleseismic body waves
were integrated into ground displacements, and decimatedwith a sampling period of 1.5 seconds. We applied an antialiasing Butterworth low pass filter before the re-sampling.
Surface waves may produce large off-diagonal components
in the data covariance matrix, which can not be treated in
the inversion approach of Yagi and Fukahata (2011).
To evaluate our model, we used 28 observed uplift/subsidence data along the coast and estuarine valleys(Farı́as et al., 2010). Coastal uplift was estimated by measurements of a white fringe formed by dead coralline crustose algae raised above the lower intertidal zone, and subsidence was measured based on inundated constructions andvegetation (Farı́as et al., 2010). We also used a strong motion digital recording at Concepción (CCSP station), belonging to the strong motion network of the Seismological
Service (SSN), Universidad de Chile (Barrientos, 2010).
Using this record we obtained the permanent displacement
at Concepción. Finally we compare the displacement es-

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Table 1. Velocity model.

Fig. 1. Source model of the 27 February 2010 Maule earthquake, Chile.
Color scale represents the slip amplitude and arrows the slip direction.
Our CMT solution of the earthquake is shown. The moment rate function of the earthquake is displayed in the inset. Approximate source areas of the 1960 and 1985 earthquakes are shown (Barrientos and Ward,
1990; Campos et al., 2002).

In Table 1 we show the 1-D structural velocity model used
for calculating the Green functions (Bohm et al., 2002). We
added an ocean layer with 1-km thickness to model water
reverberations in teleseismic waveforms. The thickness of
this layer was estimated by trial and error to optimize thefits to inverted data.
Our fault model has a length of 486 km along strike and awidth of 180 km along dip. We used the epicenter estimatedby SSN (73.239W, 36.290S), which is located about 62 km
south-west of the USGS hypocenter. The fault geometry forinversion (strike 15◦ and dip 18◦ ) was estimated by slightly
modifying the gCMT solution (strike 18◦ and dip 18◦ ) basedon fit to teleseismic waveforms. The starting time of rupture at each space knot was evaluated by its distance to the
hypocenter and the rupture front velocity. Based on our preliminary analysis, we determined the rupture front velocity
and the depth of hypocenter to be 2.8 km/s and 34 km, respectively.

timated from the strong ground motion record with thosefrom a high-sampling GPS record at station CONZ located 9 km west of CCSP in the Transportable Integrated
Geodetic Observatory (TIGO) (Sierk and Hase, 2010),
which is jointly operated by the Universidad de Concepciónand the German Federal Agency for Cartography and 4. Source Rupture Process
Geodesy (BKG).
The Maule earthquake ruptured a source area of nearly
400 km extending along strike from the Arauco Penin3. Teleseismic Inversion and Fault Model
sula to southern Santiago (Fig. 1). Our solution indicates
To investigate the rupture process of the Maule earth- an average rake angle of 93.5◦ and a seismic moment of
quake, we used a multitime window inversion scheme that 1.48e22 N m (Mw 8.7). This value is slightly smaller thanincorporates the data covariance matrix from the observa- the gCMT solution (Mw 8.8), but it is within the typical ertion and modeling errors (Yagi and Fukahata, 2011), and the ror range in teleseismic inversions, due to differences in the
Akaike Bayesian Information Criteria (ABIC) for optimum velocity model (Yagi et al., 2004). The source process isestimations of smoothness constraint parameters (Yagi and characterized by two asperities with peak slip of about 10 m
Fukahata, 2008). The Yagi and Fukahata (2011) inversion and a rupture area of approximately 400 km × 140 km.
approach incorporates correlated errors that originate from The first and largest asperity is located around the hypocenuncertainty of Green’s functions, to reduce the bias of in- ter and the second is located approximately 135 km northversion results. In this technique slip rate distribution on east of the hypocenter. The largest moment release is lothe assumed fault plane is represented as a linear combina- cated seaward in a region near to the coastline (Fig. 1). In
tion of basis functions in space and time. For the Maule Fig. 2 we plot the sequence of the rupture for the average
earthquake the basis functions of slip rate in space were ob- slip velocity in each 10-s window. We can observe thattained using B-splines, and 27×10 knots distributed with an for the first 30 s the rupture started in the in-plane direcuniform interval of 18 km across the fault plane. The slip tion along the dip. After 30 s the rupture started propagattime history of each knot was represented by overlapping ing bi-laterally along the fault strike. The first major motriangle functions interpolated with linear B-splines with an ment release episode for this earthquake occurred at aroundinterval of 1.5 s, allowing a maximum rise time of 60 s. 50 s, near the hypocenter, followed by a comparable moIn order to obtain a stable solution, we applied smoothness ment release event at 80 s located 130 km north-east of theconstraints with respect to time, the spatial distribution of hypocenter (Fig. 2). Main rupture lasted for about 110 s.
slip, and the rake angle. The optimum smoothness parame- These features of the rupture are also observed in the source
ters were estimated by finding the minimum value of ABIC. time function of the earthquake (inset in Fig. 1). The aver-N. PULIDO et al.: RUPTURE PROCESS MAULE EARTHQUAKE

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Fig. 3. Waveform fits between vertical observed (black) and simulated(gray) teleseismic P waveforms of the Maule earthquake.

Fig. 2. Snapshots of slip velocity (gray scale) depicting the fault ruptureof the Maule earthquake in every 10-s window.

age rake angle of this model is 93◦ , which implies a difference of approximately 18◦ with respect to the convergence
direction of the Nazca plate beneath the South American
plate (DeMets et al., 2010). The northern propagation of
our rupture model also indicates a clockwise rotation of10◦ with respect to the fault strike as can be observed in
the snapshots of slip velocity after 90 s. Figure 3 displays
waveform fits between observations (black) and simulations(gray). We obtained a L2 norm misfit value of 0.17, which
we consider a good fit. The inversion methodology usedin this study is little influenced by changes in the velocity
structure and fault dip (Yagi et al., 2004). The hypocenter
location (or origin time) may only affect the relative location of slip (Yagi et al., 2004).

5.

Coseismic Permanent Displacements

In order to evaluate our source model obtained from theteleseismic waveform inversion, we used the elastic dislocation model of Okada (1992) to calculate the modelpredicted coseismic vertical displacements along the coastline as well as in a region around the source area of theMaule earthquake (Figs. 4 and 5). The distribution of thevertical displacements at the surface ressembles the shapeof the slip distribution, but slightly shifted to north-west
due to the fault geometry. The largest values of uplift andsubsidence reach 3 m and 1 m, respectively. Our model
predicts a transition from uplift to subsidence (hinge line)
near the coastline (Fig. 4). Observed uplift/subsidence values (Farı́as et al., 2010) are small in the region north ofthe epicenter (33.5–36S), which is in agreement with thevalues predicted by our model (Fig. 5(A)). In the southern portion of the rupture (36.5–38S), the observed values of coastal deformation indicate uplift of about 50 cm
in Talcahuano (points 11, 12 and 13 in Fig. 5(A)), and alarger uplift up to 2.5 m in the Arauco Peninsula (points 15
and 19 to 26 in Fig. 5(A)). Although our model predicts uplift in this region, the average of the estimated values arenearly two times smaller than the observed ones. This discrepancy suggests that larger fault slip beneath the Arauco
Peninsula than the one estimated from our slip model isrequired to explain the observed uplift in this region. A
cross section of the uplift/subsidence values normal to thecoast shows that observed values are larger in the region
closer to the trench and gradually decrease with increasing distance from the trench (Fig. 5(B)). Simulated valuesof uplift/subsidence for two cross sections along the southern and northern asperities, as well as the average valuesof uplift/subsidence for the entire fault show a similar trend(Fig. 5(B)). GPS measurements for the Maule earthquake
indicate a westward coseismic displacement of 3.0 m atstation CONZ in Concepción (Sierk and Hase, 2010). We
calculated the permanent displacement at Concepción using
the strong motion record of the earthquake at station CCSP,
which is located approximately 8 km away from CONZ.
For this purpose we first integrated the unfiltered acceleration waveform to obtain the velocity waveform (Fig. 6(A)).
To correct the velocity waveform we fitted a straight line to958

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Fig. 4. Static displacements estimated from our source model of theMaule earthquake. Contours with colors and white arrows indicate thevertical and horizontal displacements, respectively. Red dots show themeasurement points of land level changes along the coast (Farı́as et al.,2010). Red lines indicate the locations of cross sections for verticaldisplacements in Fig. 5(B).

Fig. 6. (A) Unfiltered acceleration record of the Maule earthquake atstation CCSP in Concepción. (B) Uncorrected velocity waveform obtained from the integration of the acceleration record in Fig. 6(A). (C)De-trended velocity waveform. (D) Displacement waveform (solid line)
obtained from the integration of the de-trended velocity waveform. The
dashed lines indicate the estimation errors. The red crosses show thehigh-sampling GPS dis-placement record at station CONZ. The gray arrow indicates the static displacement estimated from our source model.

an observed trend from an arbitrary point t1 within the trend
to the end of the waveform window (80 s) (Fig. 6(B)). Then
we evaluated the point t0 where the fitted line crosses thezero axis. We substracted the fitted values in the interval
between t0 and 80 s to obtain the de-trended velocity waveform (Fig. 6(C)), which we integrated in time to obtain thedisplacement waveform. We repeated this procedure varying t1 every second from 20 to 60 s to obtain the errors in
our estimation of the displacement waveform (Fig. 6(D)).
The corrected displacement waveform shows a remarkablematch with the high-sampling GPS displacement record at
CONZ (Fig. 6(D)). The estimated value of vertical offset at
CONZ from our model is slightly smaller than the observed
value (arrow in Fig. 6(D)).

6.
Fig. 5. (A) Comparison between observed (black dots) and simulated(gray dots) coseismic vertical displacements along the coast associatedwith the Maule earthquake. The numbers near the dots indicate thelocations of measurement points shown in Fig. 4. (B) Cross section forobserved data and simulations in Fig. 5(A) as a function of their distancefrom the trench. Red circles and blue squares depict simulation points
north and south of the epicenter respectively. Open circles and squares
depict observed data north and south of the epicenter respectively. The
data are plotted with error bars (Farı́as et al., 2010). Cross sectionsof average vertical displacement for the entire fault (dotted line), thesouthern asperity (solid line), and the northern asperity (dashed line)
are shown (see Fig. 4 for the locations of the cross sections).

Discussion

The main slip in our source model is located in a region
near the coastline, around the hypocenter. This feature isin good agreement with the source model of Delouis etal. (2010), but differs from the source model of Lay et al.
(2010), in which the main moment release is located near
the trench. A recent tomographic study conducted in thesource area of the Maule earthquake suggests the updip
limit of the rupture zone to be located 30–40 km awayfrom the trench (Contreras-Reyes et al., 2010). This limit isdefined by the presence of a 20–40 km wide sedimentarywedge above the subducting plate, which would behave

N. PULIDO et al.: RUPTURE PROCESS MAULE EARTHQUAKE

aseismically due to the presence of high-porosity fluid-richsediments (Contreras-Reyes et al., 2010). The source modelof Lay et al. (2010) would imply that the majority of slip
occurred in this aseismic zone. On the other hand, thehigh-frequency radiated seismic energy suggests that theMaule earthquake may be identified as a normal megathrust
event, namely an earthquake whose rupture does not extend
to the near-trench region (Newman and Convers, 2010),
supporting the rupture near the coast as indicated by oursource model.
The underestimation of uplift in the Arauco Peninsula
may suggest that the southern rupture is not well resolved
by our model. The source models of Lay et al. (2010) andDelouis et al. (2010) also display small slip in this region,
suggesting a lack of the resolution for the southern rupturein teleseismic waveform inversions in general. A possible explanation for the large observed uplift values at theArauco Peninsula as well as the absence of coseismic fault
slip obtained from teleseismic inversions beneath the peninsula, could be the occurrence of large post-seismic deformation in the region. However the large concentration of early
aftershocks of the Maule earthquake beneath the Peninsulasuggests a coseismic fault rupture in this region (Moreno
et al., 2010). On the other hand a recently published slip
model of the Maule earthquake based on the inversion ofgeodetic and tsunami data indicates larger slip in the southern region as compared to those from seismological models (Lorito et al., 2011). This difference may indicate different rupture characteristics in the southern and northern
regions in which the northern region radiated strong seismic waves, while the southern rupture was characterized byslower rupture processes, inefficient in seismic radiation.
This would explain why geodetic data better resolved thesouthern rupture. Further studies are required to investigate the characteristics of the southern rupture beneath the
Arauco Peninsula.
Acknowledgments. We would like to thank Sergio Barrientos
and Jaime Campos of the Universidad de Chile for sharing thestrong motion data used in this study. The high-sampling GPS
data were obtained from the TIGO observatory homepage. This
study was partly supported by the SATREPS project “Enhancement of Earthquake and Tsunami Mitigation Technology in Peru”.
We thank the editor-in-chief Prof. Yomogida as well as two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Teleseismic data was downloaded from the IRIS-DMC web site (http://www.iris.edu), and thegCMT mechanism was obtained from the global CMT project website (http://www.globalcmt.org).

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Nishimura