Co-seismic Earth’s rotation change caused by the 2012 Sumatra earthquake

• Main Authors: Xu Changyi, Sun Wenke
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. 2012-11-01
• Series: Geodesy and Geodynamics
• Subjects: earthquake; Earth rotation; polar motion; variation in LOD
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674984715301348

Earthquakes heavily deform the crust in the vicinity of the fault, which leads to mass redistribution in the earth interior. Then it will produce the change of the Earth’s rotation (polar motion and length of day) due to the change of Earth inertial moment. This paper adopts the elastic dislocation to compute the co-seismic polar motion and variation in length of day (LOD) caused by the 2011 Sumatra earthquake. The Earth’s rotational axis shifted about 1 mas and this earthquake decreased the length of day of 1 μs, indicating the tendency of earthquakes make the Earth rounder and to pull the mass toward the centre of the Earth. The result of variation in length of day is one order of magnitude smaller than the observed results that are available. We also compared the results of three fault models and find the co-seismic change is depended on the fault model.