Understanding Microseismicity Behavior and Their Response to Earth Processes by Improving Earthquake Catalogs

Natural earthquakes occur on faults ranging from 0 to 700 km beneath Earth's surface in different tectonic settings, such as along major subduction zones in Japan and the arc-continent collisional environment in Taiwan. Recent studies suggest that earthquake activities can be affected by various Earth processes, including extreme weather events, large earthquakes, water/snow/glacier loading and unloading, erosion and sedimentation, etc. The Gutenberg–Richter magnitude-frequency statistics suggest that the number of earthquakes decays as a power law with the increase of earthquake magnitude, which means most earthquakes are of small magnitudes, i.e., microseismicity. Studying the behavior of microseismicity and their response to the Earth’s surface process can help us to better understand fault structures at depth as well as the physics of earthquake nucleation, and to mitigate seismic hazards. However, our understanding of microseismicity may be limited by the incompleteness of standard earthquake catalogs, especially during the noisy period following extreme weather events and large earthquakes.