Why Japanese Is A Earthquake Magnet

Deep between the ocean the Filipino tectonic plate is sliding under Japan. There, at the bottom of the ocean, the Nankai trench can be found and under it, the pluton Kumano sits. And it does have a terrible secret.

Image by Arcturian from Pixabay

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Plutons are massive bodies of cooled magma that entered Earth’s crust in ancient times. When they reappear because of erosion that has a tendency to create dramatic geological bodies. They aren’t exactly rare and they can be found all over the world. One of them named Kumana sits under the ocean near Japan.

Adrien Arnulf from the University of Texas and his coworkers found that the Kumano pluton seems to play a major role in the Earthquakes that torment Japan. Based on their new 3D visualization the tectonic energy of the destructive Japanese earthquakes is often routed to several places of this pluton. So, Kumano works almost like a magnet for large earthquakes.

We have known about the Kumano pluton for some time now. But so far we haven’t known about its full size. Arnulf and his colleagues used seismic data gathered over 20 years of observations. They were also helped by the LoneStar5 supercomputer at the University of Texas at Austin. The supercomputer created a 3D model of the pluton based on millions of seismic records.

It seems that the Earth’s crust is sagging under the weight of the pluton and is bulging out above it. The surprising result is that subterranean water seeps through the crust into Earth’s mantle. At the same time, we can predict that the pluton – which is very dense – shapes the geometry of geological objects and plays a major role in the tectonics of the area.

Predicting earthquakes is very hard. But we can try to combine the 3D data with observations and try to guess what will happen in the near future. That could help us predict what the earthquakes in the area will look like and whether they will hit human residences.

Sources:

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00879-x

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