Gravity heralded the might of the 2011 Japan earthquake

Ruptures in Earth’s crust—earthquakes—generate elastic waves that travel through the crust and upper mantle at speeds of several kilometers per second. When observed at seismic stations, those waves provide information about the interior structure of the planet and the magnitude of the quake that generated them.

The earthquake’s initial rupture and subsequent seismic waves redistribute mass and thus alter Earth’s gravitational acceleration, or field. The change in the field, like an electromagnetic disturbance, propagates at the speed of light, and a seismometer feels it almost immediately. The perturbed gravitational field also induces small mass redistributions, which generate their own mini seismic waves that jiggle the ground at seismic stations before the arrival of the main elastic waves. The two tiny effects combine to give a seismometer reading of something like 1 nm/s² for the largest of earthquakes. If only its magnitude mattered, such a small gravitational effect would be swamped by the elastic waves generated at the epicenter, which show up as ground displacements five orders of magnitude greater. But thanks to their earlier arrival, the gravitational perturbations can, in principle, be registered by seismometers.

Now Martin Vallée (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris) and his team have revisited the data taken by 11 seismic stations located 427–3044 km from the site of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan and have teased out the combined gravitational signal. Given that the quake had a magnitude of 9.1, the researchers’ numerical modeling matched the observed data well. The researchers hope that, in the future, information carried by the gravitational signal can be inverted to give a prompt estimate of a large earthquake’s magnitude. (M. Vallée et al., Science 358, 1164, 2017, doi:10.1126/science.aao0746 .)