A comprehensive study of the 26th December 2004 Sumatra earthquake: possible implications on Earth rotation and investigations on the coseismic and postseismic stress diffusion associated with the seismic rupture

In this work a multidisciplinary study of the December 26th, 2004 Sumatra earthquake has been carried out. We have investigated both the effect of the earthquake on the Earth rotation and the stress field variations associated with the seismic event. In the first part of the work we have quantified the effects of a water mass redistribution associated with the propagation of a tsunami wave on the Earth’s pole path and on the length-of-day (LOD) and applied our modeling results to the tsunami following the 2004 giant Sumatra earthquake. We compared the result of our simulations on the instantaneous rotational axis variations with some preliminary instrumental evidences on the pole path perturbation (which has not been confirmed yet) registered just after the occurrence of the earthquake, which showed a step-like discontinuity that cannot be attributed to the effect of a seismic dislocation. Our results show that the perturbation induced by the tsunami on the instantaneous rotational pole is characterized by a step-like discontinuity, which is compatible with the observations but its magnitude turns out to be almost one hundred times smaller than the detected one. The LOD variation induced by the water mass redistribution turns out to be not significant because the total effect is smaller than current measurements uncertainties. In the second part of this work of thesis we modeled the coseismic and postseismic stress evolution following the Sumatra earthquake. By means of a semi-analytical, viscoelastic, spherical model of global postseismic deformation and a numerical finite-element approach, we performed an analysis of the stress diffusion following the earthquake in the near and far field of the mainshock source. We evaluated the stress changes due to the Sumatra earthquake by projecting the Coulomb stress over the sequence of aftershocks taken from various catalogues in a time window spanning about two years and finally analyzed the spatio-temporal pattern. The analysis performed with the semi-analytical and the finite-element modeling gives a complex picture of the stress diffusion, in the area under study, after the Sumatra earthquake. We believe that the results obtained with the analytical method suffer heavily for the restrictions imposed, on the hypocentral depths of the aftershocks, in order to obtain the convergence of the harmonic series of the stress components. On the contrary we imposed no constraints on the numerical method so we expect that the results obtained give a more realistic description of the stress variations pattern.