Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Seismotectonics Of The Explorer Region, Jochen Braunmiller, John Nábělek

School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications

The Explorer region offshore western Canada is a tectonically complex area surrounded by the Pacific, North America, and Juan de Fuca plates. Existing tectonic models for the region differ fundamentally. Proposed plate configurations range from multiple independent plate fragments to an Explorer plate now fused to North America along the continental margin and cut by Pacific–North America transform faults in the west. We present new seismological data constraining the region's current tectonics. We use three-component regional waveforms to determine the source parameters of 84 earthquakes with magnitude greater than 4. Combined with 34 Harvard centroid moment tensor solutions, they represent …