Moment tensors of ten witwatersrand mine tremors

Art McGarr

doi:10.1007/bf00879963

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Moment tensors of ten witwatersrand mine tremors

Art McGarr

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Abstract

Ground motions, recorded both underground and on the surface in two of the South African Gold mining districts, were inverted to determine complete moment tensors for 10 mining-induced tremors in the magnitude range 1.9 to 3.3. The resulting moment tensors fall into two separate categories. Seven of the events involve substantial coseismic volumetric reduction-??V together with normal faulting entailing shear deformation ??AD, where the summation is over fault planes of area A and average slip D. For these events the ratio-??V/??AD ranges from 0.58 to 0.92, with an average value of 0.71. For the remaining three events ??V is not significantly different from zero; these events are largely double-couple sources involving normal faulting. Surprisingly, the two types of source mechanism appear to be very distinct in that there is not a continuous distribution of the source mix from ??V=0 to-??V?????AD. Presumably, the coseismic closure indicates substantial interaction between a mine stope and adjacent shear failure in the surrounding rock, under the influence of an ambient stress for which the maximum principal stress is oriented vertically. ?? 1992 Birkha??user Verlag.

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Art McGarr. 1992. Moment tensors of ten witwatersrand mine tremors. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00879963

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