Initial insights from two broadband arrays straddling the Thwaites Glacier eastern shear margin

TitleInitial insights from two broadband arrays straddling the Thwaites Glacier eastern shear margin
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2022
AuthorsWalter, JI, Gonzalez, LFernanda, Smith, EC, Karplus, MS, Booth, AD, Nakata, N
Conference NameFall Meeting 2022
PublisherAGU
Abstract

Our international team, the Thwaites Interdisciplinary Margin Evolution (TIME) group, composed of PIs and early career researchers from several institutions across the US and UK, has spent several field seasons deploying and retrieving seismic and continuous GPS stations, in addition to conducting radar surveys. We deployed fourteen seismometers in two seven-station arrays centered around our two primary study sites along the eastern shear margin of Thwaites Glacier. Each of the two sites will be the focus of future 3D active-source seismic reflection surveys in the 22/23 and 23/24 field seasons. We collected data for a period of 2 years, through the austral winter, with a hybrid solar/lead acid and lithium battery station enclosure designed by the IRIS PASSCAL Polar Group. We applied the Python package, easyQuake to the retrieved data. It consists of a flexible set of tools for detecting and locating earthquakes. The package leverages machine-learning phase pickers, coupled with an associator, to produce a Quake Markup Language (QuakeML) style catalog complete with magnitudes and P-wave polarity determinations. The program outputs catalog QuakeML-formatted files that can be split into individual event QuakeML files. We initially identified several events within and near the shear margin. Our preliminary results suggest that some events appear to be concentrated near a possible basal asperity that is on the order a few kms from the actual shear margin, in an area of slow-moving ice. However, there is a clear deficiency in applying machine-learning detection models trained on tectonic events to a dataset consisting of mostly icequakes. Thus, we plan to improve the identification of icequake events through a variety of additional icequake detection routines. We plan to conduct continuous waveform migration and stacking and traditional short-term average/long-term average (STA/LTA) detection and association before training new deep neural networks on the Antarctic dataset. Some seismic events appear to exhibit shear wave polarization, which would be consistent with polarization observed in radar studies from our two field areas. Forthcoming results from upcoming field seasons have important implications for better understanding the stability of glacier and ice stream shear margins.

URLhttps://agu.confex.com/agu/fm22/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/1192934